


Let go (of everything you fear to lose)

by Kat2107



Series: Legacy [2]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: A++ Parenting, Competence Porn, Dad!Hux, Hux murdering people, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kid!Fic, M/M, Roadmovie with baby, That's exactly how the Force works, no mpreg!, too much chocolate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-04
Updated: 2016-06-04
Packaged: 2018-07-10 08:45:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 34,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6976123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kat2107/pseuds/Kat2107
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With Ren having left for the Resistance, Hux has pretty much given up on his ability to care.<br/>He does his job because it's his job, and takes care of his duty because it's his duty.</p><p>Until Snoke pulls his last trump card and suddenly the question of whether or not Hux cares, and for what, becomes vital to the Galaxy.<br/>Or, rather, for whom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is dedicated to [Syrum](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Syrum/pseuds/Syrum) and [Nonchalant Robert](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Syrum/pseuds/Syrum). They sat with me and held my hands while I word vomited a 4k outline, Godparents to lovely little Mia. 
> 
> Also the Betas from heaven [Eridani](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Eridani/pseuds/Eridani) who endures me and my stupid with an insane amount of inborn graciousness and [pkabyssinian](http://archiveofourown.org/users/pkabyssinian/pseuds/pkabyssinian) who cheers me up and listens to my complaints and agrees without questioning that the world sucks, whether I'm right or not.
> 
>  
> 
> I can't possibly thank [generallyhuxurious](http://generallyhuxurious.tumblr.com/) enough for the absolutely amazing art.  
> It's so amazing in fact, that the only worthy place for it was as cover :)
> 
> Enjoy!

 

Almost a year ago to the day, Brendol Hux III had died in a fiery crash. The shuttle transporting him to the training facilities on Vanua had exploded during a fight with pirates. He had been two days shy of his sixth birthday.

Ten months ago Brendol Hux I., long-serving founding member of the First Order, lost his life in a freak accident involving his shuttle’s fuel cells.

His demise left his son and sole survivor of their line bereft of any family, yet a steadfast example of the strength the First Order bred. Unwavering in his duty to the Supreme Leader, undisputed in his command of the flagship Finalizer.

The General, they called him. Nobody called him Hux anymore. Not since he had sent Ren away.

Five months.

  


"Ren, if you see my son..."

Hux had wanted to hold him back, had wanted him to stay or to take him, too.

"I won't." On the empty flight deck, their words were nothing but shadows of things unsaid or long past due date. "He's safe where he is and will stay that way. I will take care of Snoke, you take care of your...men."

Ren didn't choke on the bitterness in his own voice, neither did Hux.

_If I can't make you leave, Hux...what can?_

_Nothing_ , Hux had answered and believed it as he believed in the duty he owed to the men and women under his command. Only a silently nagging voice in the back of his mind had whispered about things he didn’t deserve.

"You aren't...."

"As self-centered as you, Ren," Hux talked past the expression of hurt on the Knight's face, unwilling to risk Ren's life for any of his sentimental notions. "I was raised to be part of a group. You will always be enough for yourself. I belong here."

 _You never did_ , went unsaid as Kylo Ren boarded the shuttle that would take him on a mission to Ilum.

He wouldn't return.

"Goodbye, Ren. Take care."

Ren, blessed be his stupidly sentimental heart, smiled before he turned and walked up the ramp. On the top, he stopped once more. "You are mistaken, Hux. There's someone who would always be enough for me, but that person isn't myself."

 

In five months, the hole his decision ripped had scabbed over, but it hadn't yet scarred.

Healing, Hux allowed himself to philosophize as he stared at the doors of Snoke’s audience chamber, was an ability of the living and one he didn’t possess anymore. A husk filled with commitment to his soldiers, duty and sheer spite that kept him from giving in, fronted by the façade of the First Order’s best General.

 

***

 

“Another system has broken away in an attempt to establish themselves as independent venue within the Republic, Supreme Leader.” Since Ren’s defection, delivery of bad new had become Hux’s permanent duty. “We need to counter the rumors that Kylo Ren is no longer with us. I suggest a decoy, to….”

“It matters not, General,” Snoke interrupted with a smile, his long spindly fingers stretched out in the gesture of a benevolent king. “I have foreseen this.”

Hux worried, of course, he worried, standing in the middle of the audience chamber, the larger than life hologram looming above him as if he knew.

Well, if he did know, Hux thought with the calm detachment that had become his most cherished companion in the last months, then it didn’t matter. Nothing Snoke could do to Hux would change the fact that Ren had escaped his influence.

 

Something in Kylo Ren had indelibly shattered when Starkiller exploded, a slow shift, initially masked by Ren’s absence and training and all the difficulties that had followed. But even after his return and his return to himself, the change had been so gradual that Hux took almost two months to notice. Little things. The way Ren could suddenly sit for hours and stare out into space, eyes light years away, murmuring low words that he then denied to have spoken; the way his hand started to rest on Hux’s shoulders when they were alone, how he watched him sleep after they’d had sex, keeping the nightmares Hux never admitted to having at bay.

 

“Snoke will kill us both if he finds out,” Hux said late one night, three-quarters of a year ago, as they lay wrapped in each other's presence, Ren’s saucer-sized paws holding Hux’s body flush to his own. Their dalliance was permitted, preferred even as it gave Hux a means to control the other man, to even out his volatile temper. Involving emotion was not.

“Worse,” Ren answered, ”he will kill you.”

The pain in his voice had awakened something within Hux, a faded selfish need to put his partner before everything else. An unexpected willingness to allow Ren to hide the existence of this - that moment, the bed, Ren’s voice gasping against Hux’s collar bones. ‘I love you, Hux, I love you so much it scares me.’, the way his lush lips tasted - deep within Hux’s mind. Hide it from Snoke, like a pearl within the hard outer shell of the Naboo shellfish that Ren hated with such vengeance.

“Not a good analogy.” Even then, in bed and naked, sated and calm as he rarely was, Ren’s voice had overflowed with disgust at the thought alone. Maybe his most charming idiosyncrasy, surely his most innocent.

“Then explain it to me,” Hux had smirked, knowing full well that he was ill-equipped to deal with the Force and all its wondrous iterations.

“Imagine how it feels when you let your thoughts wander, let them slide off of each other, morph into new thoughts, spark others when you touch one.”

Ren’s fingers elegantly recreated his words in cobweb light touches on Hux’s skin, painted the pictures he spoke into Hux’s ear onto his chest and conjured them simultaneously into Hux mind. A silver mirror, mercurial in its shifts and ripples, diffracting stray images of innocent thoughts, ships, faces, incidents of no deeper consequence into a wide scattered maze. And below, a vault.

“They’re always there, those deeper thoughts, but mere shadows until you actively reach for them and pull them to the surface.” Pictures of Hux tumbled through Ren’s mind, free and plentiful, heated skin, gentle insults lobbed with careless abandon, a little boy with red hair and scraped knees chasing an older child around a corner, laughter heavy in moist autumn air.

“You saw him again,” Hux murmured, waiting for an answer that Ren wouldn’t give. He was freer than Hux to leave and go where neither of them should.

“You’ll need a key,” Ren said instead, brushing his lips through Hux’s sweat soaked hair. “Something ordinary yet unique, a memory, a picture that no one will find abnormal, but that can’t be accidentally recreated.”

Hux turned then, slipped his arm around Ren’s middle and nipped at his shoulder in a reprimand much more gentle than it might have been before, before Starkiller, before Snoke had tried to break Kylo Ren’s mind and only Ren’s inborn streak of insanity and ingenuity had saved him.

“Andras, with the cut on his cheekbone, because you couldn’t manage to not hurt him when you tried to save him.”

“Ouch.” Looking up, Hux found Ren smiling, fishing uncannily for the deeper meaning in Hux’s words, gratefulness that had been voiced only once, in the flurry of emotion after Ren had confessed that Brendol III. was not dead, but free of the monster that had been his own grandfather.

“Nobody but you saw him like that,” Hux went on, gentling the teeth marks in Ren’s skin with his fingertips. “and me, when you showed me. But it’s innocuous enough. A memory of a boy with a cut on his cheek.”

“Snoke would expect to find a memory of your son in your thoughts.”

In a sudden stab of clarity things shifted in Hux’s mind, the past aligned with an impossible present and created a wondrous picture, brilliant in its simplicity, like the impossible beauty of fireworks to a blind man. Luckily even a blind man could light a wick.  
“That is how you came back after Starkiller, after your training,” Hux realized. Ren had returned a hollow shell, single-minded with brutal focus and no sense for any kind of distraction. And then Hux had given Ren the kiss he had promised before his departure and whatever spell he had been under had broken.

Ren smiled.  
“Does Snoke know?”  
“That I took precautions? Yes, he expected it. Does he understand? No.” Ren laughed.  
“He has no idea that I am no longer his. That my father, with one word, broke his hold and that Snoke with his actions proved everything he said.”

  
Hux hadn’t asked which word, he already knew. ‘Anything.’  
That had been the word that Brendol Hux Sr. never said to his son, not until he lay bleeding on the ground in front of Hux.  
‘What do you want, Brendol? I will do anything. Anything.’  
‘How about my son… Father.’  
“I had nothing to do with it, Brendol! Believe me.’  
‘You sent him to Vanua. You put him on that ship to be trained like a dog. He was six years old, father. Six! And so was I.’  
Ren had stood at Hux’s back, a silent, menacing shadow, smiling under the hood as he watched and as unperturbed by this patricide as he had been destroyed by the last.  
‘We can make a new child, Brendol! You can have it. I can pay her again.’  
Ren had still stood on the same spot after Hux Sr. had stopped moving. He had been just there when Hux looked up from the body and met Hux’s gaze head on, lopsided mouth pulled into a smile devoid of happiness.

 

The opposite of the look he gifted Hux outside of that particular memory.  
“I’ve never understood how good a father Han Solo was, not consciously. I needed yours to understand.”  
Their smiles, as they looked at each other, matched.  
“Will you let me do it, Hux?”  
What was he supposed to say to that? Ren had freed his boy. Ren had given Hux the gift of throttling his father. Ren lived in his head anyways until Hux found enough annoyance to block him out, something that was becoming increasingly rare.  
“Anything,” he said in the end and Ren laughed.  
“You shouldn’t give me that much leeway with your mind, Hux. You really, really shouldn’t.”  
That had been the first glimmer of treason. The first breathtaking triumph for Ren when it had worked. The first silver lining of freedom.  
Ren’s first step.  
Hux had known - not consciously, but deep within; he always understood that this was the moment he had lost Ren, sent him off towards a path that he himself could not follow.  
  
  
“You foresaw that Ren would betray us, Supreme Leader?” Above him, Snoke sat unperturbed and unknowing. “I apologize, but I fail to see the positive aspects.”  
“Ren is securely established with the Resistance. They trust him.” Snoke leaned forward, a manic glee in his eyes. “And we, General, will yank the leash and destroy them from within.”  
Worry turned into a trace of panic at the knowledge that the only person who had ever built a personal relationship with Kylo Ren in the First Order, had been…  
“No, not you, General. You are far too valuable to me and sadly not valuable enough to Kylo Ren.”  
Inside Hux’s mind skin brushed over skin, sweat-slick and hungry; in the audience chamber, Hux bowed his head to the Supreme Leader with a small, derogatory smile.  
“What then, Supreme Leader? It seems all that is important to Ren is with the Resistance, and short of abducting Ren’s ‘mother’...”  
“That might be unfeasible, General. His child on the other hand….”

The chamber doors opened with a deep rumble, not naturally achieved on a ship as advanced as the _Finalizer_. It had been done for pompous effect, to give weight to the room, to the meetings that happened in it, and to Snoke. And, as much as Hux abhorred superfluous decorum, it worked.

The door wings revealed two shapeless forms framed to greatest possible effect by the corridor’s light. A woman clothed in loose pants and a tunic clearly based off the Knights’, though completely overdone on the tears and rips. She had pulled her amber hair into a thick braid, revealing a pretty face otherwise unremarkable. Except for her eyes. Her eyes were unblinking and cruel.

At her side walked a child, clothed from chin to toes in a plain black robe cinched at the waist with a belt. She was no older than Andras had been and holding her fists balled into the fabric of her robe, her pale face blank with a lot of effort. Hux forced himself to smile as the woman’s gaze skimmed over him, something like satisfaction settling on her features. The girl looked straight ahead, her gaze carefully not touching Snoke and while she did not limp, something in the way she held herself was awkward and stiff.

But she was Ren’s child, from her coloring to her full lips, even the waves in her shoulder length hair. It felt to Hux, as if her presence sang to a long dormant part of himself, a resonance with no sense or reason, but the fact that they both she and Hux carried within them a part of the same whole.

 _Shit_ , he thought without trying for eloquence. His jaw might have dropped if not for his lifelong training in absolute control. As it was, his gaze stayed locked on both of them, oblivious to Snoke’s holographic presence, until first the mother and then the child knelt and bowed their heads.

“Supreme Leader,” the woman crooned with a smile. “I have brought you Ren’s child. She is ready for you.”

 _I am not_ , Hux thought.

Or maybe he was.

 

***

 

Hux stared solemnly at his reflection in the mirror, worked his gaze slowly over skin that should have held more color. His eyes, skewing towards cold stone grey at the moment, locked on their reflected counterparts as he tugged a glove over his shaking left hand with his trembling right.

 

Under his feet, the _Finalizer_ hummed the idle song of the anti-grav-thrusters, at rest above a nondescript planet. She wanted to move, was made to move. His beautiful ship.

The sirens in the corridors were silent now; the chaotic patter of a hundred feet had slowed to a trickle and then stopped as well.

 

 _That’s it_ , he thought and searched the face in the mirror for any trace of hesitancy. What Hux found were deep shadows under his eyes, a few lines that hadn’t been there five months ago. The gray tint of his skin spoke of too many nights with too little sleep and too much alcohol.

But no fear. No hint of second thoughts.

 

Pressing his lips into a tight line, he slipped the knife from the dressing table into his right boot. He combed his hair into a precise line one last time before he tugged the front of his uniform jacket into an impeccably straight display.

The man in the mirror dipped his head in a last crisp military salute, then Hux grabbed his pistol off the dressing table and marched out into the empty halls of his ship.

The door to Ren’s quarters had become unfamiliar in the last months. Nothing but a door among hundreds; the last on the officer’s floor. No, not quite. Beyond it was still the emergency evacuation exit. A happy coincidence Ren had insisted on, always prone to vanishing on little excursions of his own.

 

It might have been polite to smile when the door slid open, but Hux just couldn’t be bothered as he came face to face with the deep scowl of a woman. Pale. Amber hair. Pretty, though once again that impression was damped by the fact that she wore something that made Ren’s rags look outright high-fashion.

 _She has gray eyes,_ he mused, raised his gun and put a hole between them.

 

***

 

“Lady Ren, you honor me with your presence.” Hux smiled, permitting himself the smallest hint of self-satisfaction at Salaii’s surprise when he greeted himself. The opportunity to gauge both females’ reaction had too good to pass. People transitioning from one domain to another, like his suite, tended to inadvertently drop their facades.

Technically the mother was not a Ren. That was an honor only bestowed the Knights, not their retinue. Hux extended it anyways for the same reason he had lowered his own status and opened the door. Catch them unawares, lift them up. To maybe beat down later.

That depended on how much more the woman who had carried Ren’s child would annoy him.

The woman caught herself quickly and strutted past him with a haughty smile, dressed now in less rags and more formal attire than the day before in the audience chamber. People said that Hux was very good at reading others. People were right.

Salaii enjoyed the attention, she had jumped at the chance to dine with Hux, to parade Ren’s daughter to him, the symbol of her status.

As Hux bowed low and extended his right hand in greeting to the girl left standing in the doorway, he smiled. For a moment, nothing happened. The girl followed her mother’s retreating form with worried eyes, waiting until Hux was safely positioned between them before she acknowledged his presence, allowed herself to survey him. A spark of curiosity sprang into her eyes, a little flame, squashed immediately at Salaii’s voice.

“Miaro!” It had taken her, Hux checked on the wall chrono, half a minute to notice the absence.

Lady Salaii had far less control over the child than she thought. Lady Salaii was also far less intelligent than she had been led to believe. Otherwise, she would have noticed the minute shift in Hux’s stance to intercept her charge.

“May I escort you to the table, Lady Ren?” Hux said with a low voice and supplied the correct answer in his thoughts, loud, unmistakably tacked to the outermost layers of his consciousness where she would only need to skim them off. _You may, General._

The child’s eyes widened. In fear, in shock, Hux lacked experience with children to competently assume. But she was trained to obey, she could not ignore his offered hand for long.

“You may, General,” she murmured and took his hand, stumbling imperceptibly as Hux pushed another thought outward.

 _‘It’s impolite to read other’s thoughts, my lady.’_ She blinked. Blinked once more when he added: _“but I grant you permission.’_

 _‘Thank you,’_ she whispered in response and she felt exactly like Ren.

 

The silence had been the worst after Ren had left. Hux kept searching for that sometimes mute, sometimes temperamental, but always intelligent and surprisingly insightful presence at the corners of his mind. For weeks he kept turning to look over his shoulder, searching for Ren when a mental inquiry went unanswered. Of course, all of them went unanswered.

 

Miaro’s mother’s anger faltered when it came face to face with his perfectly polite smile. Back when Hux Sr. had still tried to coax his son into abandoning his shameful inclinations and into marriage, Hux had spent hours and hours on end bedazzling the daughters of officers and business owners to earn himself a few precious moment of reprieve. He had not expected to make use of that particular skillset ever again.

“I apologize, it was me who dawdled.” The lie was easy as he pulled back a chair for the girl, seating her on her own at one side of the square table with a healthy safety margin to her mother. Catering had installed the polished monstrosity in his suite for the occasion with the explicit order to use a table big enough to allow for distance between the diners. “I am not used to dealing with children and forgot how intimidating I must appear to her, Lady Ren. Please forgive me.” Flattery, smokescreens. Salaii’s expression was quickly replaced with yet another haughty smile.

 

She was unaware of the second audience Hux had been granted the day before, the one where he inquired about her actual worth and the security measures to prevent her from using Miaro Syrum Ren as a bargaining chip against the First Order. She had not heard Snoke’s laughter at the idea that a common vessel with no usage of the Force might stand a chance against him. Hux almost pitied her except for the part where she had brought all of this upon herself. Salaii’s arrogance was typical for the Knights of Ren and with the worth Force-sensitive children had, especially this one, she could afford it. She seemed to take it just a notch farther, though, an assurance in her own importance that bordered on negligence. Her worth would plummet as soon as Miaro was fully in the hands of Snoke until she became less than disposable, a quick death her only reward.

 

A young ensign had been tasked to be their attendant. A man fresh out of the Academy, nothing exceptional but extremely reliable and the son of one of the old imperial families. Which ensured at least that he had the necessary manners. The mess had set the table with the good tableware.

All to distract a woman whose only distinguishing feature was that Kylo Ren had somehow gotten his cock into her long enough to impregnate her. Looking at her, her behavior and how little she was his type, Hux remained unconvinced that Ren had been much of an active participant in that.

Ensign Morris waited until Hux sat to step closer, polished up to his last hair as the strapping young First Order officer. His pedigree and his family education showed when he barely blinked as Miaro’s gaze zeroed in on him, burning with interest.

“What is a leakage regulator?” she asked as if the young officer had spoken aloud. It took her only a second to catch up on her lapse. Her hand flew to her mouth before the last syllable was spoken, following words she could no longer catch.

Hux did not interfere as the color drained from her face and she turned to her displeased mother with horror. That did not mean he didn’t notice every twitch in both of them.

“Miaro Syrum Ren! What did I say about speaking without being spoken to?”

“I apologize, Mother.” The child sank into her chair, her eyes downcast in a rather dramatically played up display of remorse for such a small infraction.

“We will talk about this later.” All of Salaii’s haughty behavior had evaporated. She sat ramrod straight, ignoring both Hux and the Ensign.

Her eyes flashed ice-blue in the low light but Hux was not sure if that wasn’t just cruelty.

Punishment and reward were both staples of the Stormtrooper program, Hux just wasn’t sure if reward was involved here at all.

“Miaro?” Hux had dealt with enough nervous junior officers to find the right tone, one he would use to calm a spooked animal. “You should apologize to the Ensign, too. Unsolicited mind-reading is extremely impolite. Even your father understood that at some point.” _He just didn’t care_ , Hux added in the privacy of his mind, noting both the dissatisfied pull around Salaii’s mouth at his words and the spark of amusement in Miaro’s eyes, carefully shielded from her mother’s scrutiny by her hair.

“I apologize, Ensign Morris.”

Hux’s nostrils flared, his fingernails digging into his palms as a sharp reminder to keep a straight face. Ren’s daughter lacked both the sincerity he had wished for, nor had Morris introduced himself. Hux was just too inappropriately amused to point it out.

_‘Did my father read minds, too?’_

Morris, outwardly unfazed accepted her fake apology with good graces and turned to her mother to present to her the menu. Hux made a mental note to give him a recommendation for good conduct in the face of difficult circumstances.

_‘Your father is an exceptionally gifted mind reader and mental combatant. He just lacks any restraint. I expect better of you, Miaro.’_

_‘They say, he is a traitor.’_

They. Snoke. Her mother. The Knights of Ren. Everybody.

_‘Ren merely returned to the path that had been his all along.’_

The thought was out before Hux thought better of it, he felt safe with her in his mind as if she wouldn’t spill his secrets just to buy herself some advantage.

 _‘I won’t.’_ She whispered the thought. A solemn vow, delivered with her gaze fixed to the tabletop, shoulders curled in, making herself smaller.

Opposite Hux, Salaii had come to a decision. “We will take the shellfish.” Inwardly Hux sighed.

“Do you like shellfish, Miaro?”

It had been stupid to order either that or Corellian Fricassee, based on nothing but the food preferences of Kylo Ren. Foolish and desperate and unbecoming of Brendol Hux II. The payment for his shortcomings, in this case, would be extracted from the child. If she abhorred the shellfish as much as Ren did there were exactly two ways this would go. She would leave hungry or her mother would force her.

Hux cast a glance at Salaii. Miaro’s mother would definitely force her.

Miaro herself was no help whatsoever.

“I don’t know?” She gave the possibly worst answer.

“How about Fricassee?” Hux tried again.

“I…” The girl glanced at her mother. “I don’t know, sir.”

“Then we will take both and Lady Ren will choose when she had the opportunity to make an informed decision.” Morris nodded at once and Hux couldn’t suppress a smile at the immediate clarification of the hierarchy.

“General, you cannot just overrule my authority in front of the child.” Now he had Salaii’s attention. He still wasn’t sure about her eye color, but that was very much cruelty in their depths.

“Lady Salaii…” Hux locked his gaze with hers, his fingers curling slowly around his water glass. “I can even less let the Supreme Leader’s apprentice leave my invitation hungry. Unless you are of the opinion that your authority supersedes his, Lady Salaii?” The slight emphasis on her name rang nicely in the sudden silence. Hux let it hang for a few moments before he raised his glass.

“To our success.” She had no choice but to follow suit.

In his mind reigned silence, full of awe and a sudden spark of hope.

Miaro chose the fricassee.

 

***

 

Inside, the quarters were surprisingly familiar, unchanged since Ren had lived here.

He had always kept the rooms austere to the point of laziness. No rug, nothing to sit on but two low pillows at a knee-high table. The same ugly desk stood against the wall that separated the main room from the former meditation chamber, now a bedroom.

 

Hux dragged the body inside by the collar and dropped it next to the door.

And that was her contribution to the state of the Galaxy. He might have found a modicum of pity for her, but even before this whole sorry mess, Hux had never had much love to spare for the Knights of Ren and their retinue.

 

He found his objective waiting in the former meditation chamber, sitting with her knees drawn to her chest on the bed. Her legs vanished under the black unbelted tunic that seemed the standard dress for the Knights. Suspicion heavy in her dark eyes as they traced his steps until he dropped to one knee in front of her, bringing their heads level.

 

This close, her eyes were more hazel than brown. Another stray thought, evidence of his fraying mental state. She reached for his neck with spindly arms mottled with finger-shaped bruises and a bisected smile that shone as if she had found a beautiful secret. The cut on her lower lip was not quite fresh enough to still ooze blood.

 

“Hello Miaro,” Hux murmured as she tucked her face into his neck, the last glimpse of her huge eyes a gutting blow. Trust mixed with pain and with so many other things he swore he would never see again; that Hux had actively pushed from his thoughts ever since the day Ren had walked away and just like that it all came rushing back.

 

***

 

_“Come with me Hux. We can make this work.”_

Hux turned, staring into the permanent semi-darkness that hovered in Ren’s rooms like an imprint of their former inhabitant.

He had stood there, right next to the low table, with bloodshot eyes and bloodied lips, tears drying on his cheeks from yet another nightmare. Snoke had demanded that Ren attacked the Jedi girl in her dreams and Ren, because he was stupid beyond compare sometimes, had of course tried to do exactly that. At least that had been what Hux had believed, holding the man’s body as he shivered through mental combat and total exhaustion. He should have known better. Whatever Ren had been, stupid had never been it.

“I know you know that this won't work, this whole idea of the First Order is nothing but Snoke setting the Galaxy on fire!"

Ren’s words had echoed through the emptiness of his rooms, whispering over Hux’s mind like the drumbeat of exploding planets.

"Yes, Ren, I know,” Hux had murmured and slipped his arms around his lover’s waist. “But my place is here with my men who will have no choice but die for the idea that bred them, just as it bred me."

“But Hux…” He still remembered the desperate clutch of Ren’s fingers, the hitch in his voice that begged for Hux to just see reason. Fact was, and maybe Ren knew, Hux didn’t want to go, couldn’t find it in him to go anywhere.

“It is too late for me, Ren. But not for you, so go, just fucking go!” Hux had said and pressed his lips to Kylo Ren’s, biting hungrily, tasting blood as if that could keep the man with him just a little while longer, an imprint of sorts. “I'll cover your exit"

 

***

 

Once her arms locked around his neck, she just clung to him as if her life depended on it. Hux didn’t have much choice but to wrap one arm around her in turn as he stood, his right hand tightly clutching the pistol.

Hux spared a moment to look for anything worth taking, but there was nothing here that looked like it belonged to a little girl. Another child-sized black tunic, this one with sleeves, was slung over a hanging rail, along with what looked like the black woolen robe she had worn the first time he had seen her.

 

The child’s feet were wrapped in strips of cloth. To keep her from running, perhaps. Or because it had never been necessary, the polished steel floors of space ships gave little necessity for shoes. In the end, Hux grabbed the robe and tucked it around her. At least it was warm.

“Let’s go,” he said and twisted his lips until it almost resembled a smiled, lost to the permanent semi-darkness that hovered in Ren’s rooms like an imprint of their former inhabitant.

The girl didn’t say anything as he walked past her mother’s body, didn’t even flinch, though he felt her raise her head to look.

 

The emergency exit had unlocked the moment the sirens had sounded fifteen minutes earlier, this whole segment of the ship empty as people headed for their allocated assembly stations.

It had been, as Phasma had mused in her rasping, warm caramel voice, time for a ship-wide exercise anyways.

 

“You could join,” Hux remembered himself saying as his boots hammered out an urgent rhythm on the stairwell that led down to the hangar bays. “There will always be a place for good military officers in the Galaxy.”

The irony of the situation had not escaped him, as Phasma had laughed and shaken her head.

"No, Sir, my place is with my men and women. It seems, however, yours is with someone else."

She had patted his shoulder and nodded, not even a shred of doubt in her posture and Hux had wondered if he’d ever been this secure, this settled in his own bones. And when it had become obvious and unbearable that he wasn’t anymore, playing foil to others’ ambitions no longer enough.

 

***

 

Back pressed flush against the wall next to the landing, Hux strained his ears to listen for the unmistakable sound of steps. This floor, three down from the top residential quarters, should contain at least a three-man security patrol.

“There’s nobody,” whispered the small voice from his shoulder, and Hux found a pair of clear eyes watching him with the promise of a smile. “They’re on the other end.”

“Thank you,” he responded and carried her around the corner and towards the side entrance of hangar bay C17.

 

In five minutes a set emergency team would sweep this corridor, securing an outer perimeter in the simulated event of a hull breach or major fire in the aft living quarters. They would scan every floor from here on up, reacting only when they found life forms still present.

 

They would have reacted when they found the mother and child still in Ren’s quarters, only to be deterred by Snoke’s orders. As it stood, there was nothing to be found and no questions to be asked.

Not until Hux didn’t show up for his shift in three hours.

The systems would automatically add him to the tallies of accounted-for personnel, a measurement Hux had implemented after a few false alarms concerning simulation supervisors in the early days.

In ten minutes an evacuation order would be issued for the non-combat vessels in the transport hangar. His one chance. The only chance to get away without dragging Phasma and half a dozen officers down with him. Everything up to this point might be explained away as an individual effort, all scrutiny on Hux.

Phasma herself would not even appear as a blip on Snoke’s radar. She was the Captain of the Stormtroopers, far removed from the ship’s command. Hux had ordered the emergency exercise and put the command into Alva’s hands, knowing full well he set his third-in-command up for failure, charges of treason and possible death. It was nothing personal, but he had never liked Alva.

Alva was imperial offspring, well off from the start. Not a flaw in itself, had it not given him access to a position he was horribly unsuited for. Hux despised incompetence. Maybe it was his last gesture to his crew then; Hux’s loyalty would always first and foremost be to those that were loyal to him. Maybe he was turning into a sentimental fool at last, suddenly driven for as much as he hadn’t been in the last months.

 

It was a horrible irony that between the two of them, Ren, who had had no desire whatsoever to work towards an end goal, had been the one in possession of exactly that: somewhere he could go, something to strive for, to fight for, whereas Hux…

He still didn’t have a goal or a destination, no endpoint to reach, but at least he had a mission.

The child was staring at him, her lips quirked in a peculiar expression; half smile, half worry.

 

“Are you reading my thoughts again?” Hux whispered, low enough to have the words evaporate harmlessly between the narrow walls.

“You said it was impolite.” The child responded with a bad stage whisper of her own.

“And does that stop you?”

Marvel of marvels if it should. That she should have been too young to even access his thoughts was of no consequence.

He had no defenses against her.

 

***

 

The shuttle in dock 204 waited with non-descript patience, the same as the shuttles to its left and right. Hux would have preferred to use his personal ship, but the pragmatic in him had won out in the end. There had been no time to secretly stock it with supplies, whereas nobody would look twice with a standard transporter. The ship had a hyperdrive and shielding and that was all they needed.

 

“Sit,” Hux said, as he placed the girl on the co-pilot’s chair, strapping her in as best as he could. “This might get rough.”

“Yes, sir.” Her smile cut him right through. This child had no business smiling and yet here she was, looking at him as if he had hung the moon. He remembered that look from waking at night and finding the Galaxy’s deadliest individual staring at him like the sentimental, lovestruck idiot that he was.

So he smiled back.

 

Strapping himself in, running the checklist, his chrono showed T minus 6.

Looking to the side, he found her watching him, her lip curled into an expression that dared not quite be a smile this time. She had not smiled at her mother, had rarely ever looked at the woman, but with him, the girl didn’t seem to have those qualms.

Kylo Ren’s parentage was written across the girl’s face in bold colors, black on white. The too large, pouting mouth, the cat-like eyes, staring at Hux with an emotional depth no five-year old should possess. And pain. Nothing overt, only fading bruises on porcelain skin.

Reaching into his pocket now, Hux produced a bag of sweet, creamy blocks of sugar that stuck to the teeth, and offered it to her.

Miaro reached across the console between them, after a doubtful look over her shoulder, and took the bag with slow deliberation.

 

Outside, flight technicians hurried around in a dance of barely co-ordinated chaos. Inside the shuttle, for him, there was only the face she made as she forcefully chewed her treat.

She had her brows furrowed and her nose scrunched into tight concentration and a grin that was perhaps not quite sane. But then, which child was? How would he know?

“Shuttle 988 NC-TS, follow allocated path for take-off, sequence five.”

“Roger,” Hux responded, consciously holding back on the crisp pronunciation that was his norm. Next to him, the small human that should be shocked into terrified silence, instead growl-giggled in her earnest fight with a piece of candy.

“You’ll be between me and them,” she answered a question Hux hadn’t asked, after she managed to unstick her teeth. A short glance was all he could spare to gauge her deeper meaning.

“It’s impolite to read people’s thoughts, Miaro.”

“You will not hurt me,” she answered and maybe Hux gave a little too much power on the thrusters. Not suspicious, just…

“I would much prefer not to,” he grated, trying hard to fly inconspicuously, “but I need you to be silent now.”

The protocols called for double starts. Hux had never been a bad pilot, but it had been years since he had actually flown in formation from hangar bays and along pre-allocated flight paths. He knew them all, of course, had reviewed them before implementation, knowing, even then, that one day the intimate knowledge of the _Finalizer’s_ minutiae would be his saving grace. Still, his heartbeat hammered in his chest in an unrelenting tattoo counting down the seconds.

 

And then they were out. Behind them, the giant metal behemoth that had been his ship, and in front of them a dead planet hanging like a broken ornament before the star-studded vastness that was the Galaxy’s core. Back on the ship, he was a king, ruling over thousands of lives at the whim of his emperor, destroying millions with a flick of his finger. Nameless millions without weight or consequence, collateral damage in a righteous war that he had fought in the name of war itself. It was what he did, what he knew, what he was.

Out here, he was nothing but a man who had learned too late what being a person meant, being cherished for himself not his duties. He had sacrificed his son to be broken and reformed into a more appealing version of himself and set the universe aflame because that had been expected of him. Hux had always excelled at meeting and exceeding expectations.

With a deep breath, he enforced control, lest his heart pick up the speed to gallop through all the surety he had finally known since Snoke had brought the girl into the audience chamber.

Even after everything, he had let Ren walk away. Had chosen duty, comfortable duty, over a man he would have claimed to love if that word were part of his vocabulary. ‘Duty was my truth,’ Hux would have said to anybody asking. And that was true.

Casting a glance to the right he caught the knowing gaze of the girl. “The Force wanted you to.”

“The Force can’t make a man’s decisions for him.”

“But it can make him know the future,” Miaro Syrum Ren recited one of the numerous mystic books her father had always lobbed about and smiled, positively guileless.

If so, the Force must have given him the knowledge that he one day would need to repay his debt to Ren.

Her smile grew.

“We need to talk about mind reading.” Her face fell. Hux should be glad about any amount of power over her behavior, instead, he felt guilty.

The planet in front of them grew, pockmarked, fissured desolation, a dire promise for his own future.

“And you need a different name.” When she piqued up and jumped onto the chance to change the subject, he felt absurd relief. “How about Mia?” She smiled.

 

Hux gave power to the thrusters and lead them into a polar orbit around the planet, following the protocol that advised ships to take cover in case the Star Destroyer blew up. All around them the other shuttles had converged along more conservative paths because the First Order did not thrive on unpredictability.

 

His fingers already typed the hyperspace parameters. One short jump to get away, then a longer jump to get farther away, changing lanes at the earliest opportunity to shake off any pursuers and then…

 

The _Finalizer_ vanished from the viewport, denying him a last look at his ship and the goodbye they both deserved.

There was still time to turn around, go back, fabricate a story and never think of treason again.

With a sideward glance , he took in the child, in her perfect little facsimile of a robe of the Knights, her ridiculous face that looked like a cuter, better-proportioned version of Ren.

 

Under his fingers, the shuttle vibrated. They had supplies for weeks. They could live in this thing. Hux was perfectly capable of repairs and could keep them afloat until nobody in the First Order could predict with any surety where they’d show up.

 

“Ready?” he asked the child in the co-pilot’s seat, still arduously chewing, though her eyes said that she knew he wasn’t a shining savior. Not hers, nor anybodys.

Still, she smiled.

“Yes, sir,” she said, and like that, flooded the shuttle’s small cockpit with radiant hope, sitting straighter with the expectation of something good, something positive ahead of her.

Hux couldn’t promise her that, nothing but trying his damnedest to make it true. As Ren had done for Brendol Hux III.

He activated the hyperdrive.


	2. Chapter 2

The Universe, Hux thought, or maybe the Force, he corrected himself immediately, had a weird sense of humor.

Down here in the narrow maintenance tunnel that ran between the refresher ducts and the life support system, it was all too easy to appreciate that. Years back an engineer had come to him, a Major liaisoning with their shipyards, to pitch the possibility of a long range transponder on their shuttles. It was, he had explained to Hux, a measure of safety with the dangers of the Unknown Regions so close.

Hux still heard himself say: “How well can you hide it.” And he cursed his faint thrill of excitement when the only response had been the question if he still needed it accessible for repairs. 

The life sustainment hummed softly to Hux’s right, the icy temperatures of the oxygen recycler burning unpleasantly through the isolation and into the bare skin of his forearm. To his left clanked the drainage system of the refresher and Hux prayed that nobody turned that on while he was stuck elbow deep between the pipes in an attempt to reach around the water system and for the transponder.

Maybe Hux should care more about his change in circumstances, maybe he should be angry that the man who had a little over a year ago destroyed the government of the Republic was now a fugitive desperately trying to get rid of his ship’s long range locator that he himself had implemented.

The man who had spat vitriol and ordered the death of billions at the will of his Supreme Leader was now in his dress pants with his dress shirt rolled up to the elbows, caked in oil sludge and grease. And did not care. 

It was as if he had shed Brendol Hux II. the moment he had pulled that lever and something new had emerged. This man didn’t give a damn about decorum, appearances and, weirdly, he could not care less for power. 

And for the first time, Hux found, that he cared for anything again. Anything looked at him with hazel eyes and a crooked smile and desperately needed a new change of clothing and child appropriate occupation. Anything was asleep right now, had fallen into bed but not without eliciting reassurance from Hux that he would be there when she woke. 

 

His fingers finally wrapped around the cables that plugged the transponder into the ship’s circuits, an ingenious design, really. Nobody who didn’t know where it was could ever have gotten rid of this thing, but kriffing Hutt dung, why?

With a vicious yank Hux slammed his wrist against the corner of the maintenance tunnel, but as his fingers lost hold, the transponder dropping at his feet, just a stupid chip with cables. So small, so dangerous. 

Hux shoved it into the side pocket of his pants and crawled back the way he had come. 

 

***

 

“Are we going to Father?” 

Mia had sat in the co-pilot’s chair, her vivid gaze resting on Hux and he had wished he could hide. Because what had he been supposed to tell her? Beyond the obvious. 

“No, it’s too dangerous for now.” That was the truth. Until he knew exactly to which degree Snoke could influence her, Hux was not going to bring her near Kylo Ren. 

But that had only been the smallest part of it and as he had watched her watch him, his mind grappling for ways to explain, he had had to admit that he couldn’t even explain it to himself. 

“Your father has another child to take care off,” seemed too cruel and really, Ren would drop everything for her without stealing anything from Andras. 

“I am afraid that the Resistance will use you just as Snoke wanted,” which wasn’t a wrong thought  _ per se _ . Force-sensitive children were rare and everybody tried to get their hands on power in a Galaxy as tightly locked in a struggle as theirs. 

“I’m not ready to face execution,” was the most stupid reasoning. Hux couldn’t care less and yet… and yet…

 

“I don’t know how to find your father.” That was true. An admission of failure on his part. If Hux had known how to reach Kylo Ren, he would have been with him in a heartbeat. Except he didn’t. And as he now looked at Ren's daughter and her pitiful hopeful expression, he couldn’t help but admit defeat. 

 

He didn’t even know who Ren was anymore. He didn’t know how this Galaxy worked outside the cold control of the First Order. Hux knew shockingly little for a man that prided himself so much on his own capability. 

 

He had no destination, no game plan, only a vague sense that he needed to reach the Ljiabra Asteroid Station station, a pirate haven on the border between Republic and neutral territory. It was far enough from the First Order to safely dock this once and in that short a time frame the Republic would not yet know who it was that stole a freighter and defected. Their information channels within the FO were abysmal at best. 

Hux knew that the secret account Ren had been using was still good and that it now held most of Hux’s personal wealth. That would tide them over for a while. Not much, because contrary to rumors, he was not rich. 

There was the cold hard logistics of their situation: food, camouflage the shuttle, find means of survival for him and the child that kept her out of the hands of the people who wanted to use her. 

These were his first steps, but beyond that? 

“I need more information before we can try and find him, if that is alright with you.”

“I trust you,” she said with a smile, showing a frightening insight into who he was and at the same time a staggering capability for emotional blackmail. Hux didn’t know if that was just her, or if it was something all little girls possessed, but his fear turned from a nebulous, unspecified anxiety into something more tangible. He truly had no defenses against her. And he circled back to how little he knew about Snoke’s influence on her.

 

As he sat in the same pilot’s chair, the child fast asleep in one of the cots, his gaze fixed out the viewport with the grit of 36 hours without sleep rubbing at his eyes, he smiled. 

“She’s beautiful and no sense for personal boundaries. Just like you.” The void didn’t care for his whisper, his heart though, his stupid, treacherous heart made a little leap, a bump, and dance that he hadn’t felt since… he couldn’t say, but he could still remember very well when it had done that for the first time. 

 

***

 

It had been so easy, really, to dismiss Kylo Ren with his overbearing personality and the horrendous amount of effort with which he tried. Hux had dismissed him, tried to keep him out of the way of real work like he would a petulant child. Kylo Ren had taken it until he hadn’t anymore.

At first, there had been an idea, crazy of course, but the calculations which Hux had conducted in the privacy of his free time had held up. Moreover, they promised something great, something impossible, if one only tried to reach for it. He requested Unamo and Mitaka to build a model simulation and present their results with barely restrained scientific glee to the ship’s command structure.

Everybody had been impressed, politely at first, then excitedly, and then a lone voice in the background, soft, despite the distortion, had spoken.

"It is not possible. This ship is not made to do a jump out of the gravitational field of anything, General."

"And when, Lord Ren," In hindsight Hux had to admit that he had spoken with annoyance rather than calculation. "did you become an expert at piloting a ship?"

It had been a mistake to underestimate the Supreme Leader’s pet, to see him exactly as he had been presenting himself. At that moment, under the cold gazes of his highest officers, Hux had expected childish bluster from his co-commander, idle posturing, and insults about his own capabilities that would have fallen flat. It was what he had come to expect from Kylo Ren and his unbearable arrogance.

Kylo Ren faltered slightly with the room’s attention on him, mask or not, and whatever he had wanted to say, he didn't say it.    
Instead, he pulled himself back from an invisible ledge and spoke words that, had anybody asked him, Hux would have never expected.

"In clean calculations, the  _ Finalizer _ is 293 meters too long and about ⅓ of her weight too heavy. I apologize for my lack of accuracy, I am estimating wildly on some feasible median numbers. It doesn’t matter anyways, because you won’t be able to achieve safe time window for a balanced jumping point outside of optimum simulations and will rip the ship apart. As it stands you have a three-second jump window to bring all of the ship into hyperspace against the gravitational pull of a standard Coruscant mass planet and you would need to lower it to one  second minimum or the rear end stays in real space and with it the engines."

Kylo Ren stood at the back of the room, his arms hanging limply at his side with his gloved fingers customarily curled into loose fists. He wore his cowl with casual leisure, over his mask, the usual painfully tense line of his shoulders obscured by its loose fit. 

And more. For once he stood not bent forward, like a bull waiting to charge. Leaning back against a plain table behind him, he appeared sure - of himself, of the subject.

Looking around the room, Hux found deep consternation on most faces. Only Mitaka stood in mild mortification, his ears glowing red. His inability to lie his most charming trait, although it would forever keep him from higher postings.

“Thank you for your time, gentlemen,” turning to the room, Hux addressed his officers, excluding Ren. “Discuss the presented data with your stations and report back. Good day.” And he had turned away, sure what would happen and what wouldn’t. 

When the ruckus died down, he was alone. The only target for a gaze that spoke of murder, not of polite dissent. Probably. 

“Take off the mask, Ren.” Hux threw the datapad onto the conference table. “And show me.” 

He didn’t naturally expect either task to be fulfilled, but again, he was surprised. The heavy helmet slammed onto to the table and then Kylo Ren walked past Hux to the projection still on the frontal screen.

It was rare seeing him like this, the youthful face bared and yes, Hux had no habit of lying to himself, that was why he sent everybody out. Whatever brilliant moment Ren had, he wanted to watch it.

Fumbling a bit at first, caught with his stupidly expressive face in Hux's scrutiny, it took Kylo Ren a few minutes to understand that Hux was genuinely interested. Whatever Kylo Ren was, a smooth talker he was not, but he hashed out the numbers with the instinctive fluidity of a pilot, if not a scientist, pleading his case with ever increasing surety, eyes fixed on Hux, not waiting with the bated breath of a novice for the rebuttal, but with the genuine interest of an equal. 

“What if you,” Hux murmured and stared at the numbers, as they presented themselves, “change the angle to 45°. Not a full gravitational pull, but a slide outward.”

The whiteboard found them, shoulder to shoulder, staring at the atrocity Kylo Ren called handwriting and finally the Master of the Knights of Ren nodded, before he changed the parameters of his own calculations, with fiendish glee, not at having disproved Hux, but at a perhaps feasible solution. 

“A two-second window on full weight load.” He turned his head slowly, the pale coloring of his face on the darkness of his clothes a shocking study of contrast in the garish light of the overhead lamps.

“No…” Hux plucked the pen from his hand and, leaning past his shoulder, opened a new column of calculations. “The  _ Finalizer _ can do more.” 

“I’ve studied the core capabilities and-” Kylo Ren fell silent when Hux held up a silencing hand, his presence a mute supernova behind Hux’s left shoulder, strong enough to make the heat felt through both their clothing layers.

“Don’t let it ever be known that you actually study the subjects of meetings, Ren, my officers would drop dead at their posts from shock.” Behind him Ren hissed in soft warning. It did nothing to deter. “And… those are safety ranges. The ship can do more. With a singular overload….” Hux continued to scribble, listing safe overload margins for each hyperdrive core, felt Ren’s hands brush, only once, over the small of his back. “We wouldn’t even lose one.”

“Take out lighting and standard life support in non-critical areas for 20 seconds.” Now Hux felt Ren’s breath as he spoke. “Twenty seconds won’t kill anybody.”

Hux turned his head incredulously, but he only found the monster smiling. 

“Do it,” Ren said, a manic, joyful glitter in his eyes. Hux did.

 

Later, after Hux had managed to calculate the jump window below the one second target range and Ren had grabbed him and shoved him towards the table, Hux had pondered stopping him. But then he had thought of the expression in his eyes as he had said ‘Do it.’ and forgot that it was an option altogether. 

 

No, Kylo Ren was not a smooth talker, but he had very nice lips. Hux had clung to him and leaned back against the conference table with an ankle hooked around Kylo Ren’s shoulder and his cock sliding between the unbearably moist heat of Kylo’s mouth and yes, awfully, awfully clever, indeed. 

“I’ve wanted you since I walked on board your damned ship,” Ren had groaned, caught in an almost funny half state of undress with his stupid robe and his armored tunic, but with a cock this beautiful nothing was really funny, as long as Hux had access to it. 

He didn’t bother talking, only grabbed Ren’s luscious hair and held on, the heel of his right boot resting snugly against Ren’s ass. His brain - what was left of his brain after Ren had been done with his tongue acrobatics- reduced to an insubstantial stream of consciousness. _I haven’t. I never knew. I had no idea._

I… everything came to a stuttering halt as Ren stretched him with long, graceful fingers and then took him in one, slow and deliciously possessive, slide that the unpredictable, uncontrollable entropy of Kylo Ren should not have been able to. But he did it, pinned Hux to the table with his body and his hands and his lips against Hux’s neck, murmuring “Hold on” against his skin and brought him high again and crashing mindlessly with nothing but a surprising amount of skill. 

Maybe, Hux had thought then as he pulled his clothing straight, trying to ignore the dribble of cum that made its way down his thigh, he shouldn’t be quite as pleased when Ren touched the back of his neck and stared at the smears of blood on his fingertips. But he had smiled. They both had. 

“Do you truly think you can make the jump without scattering all of us across three star systems?”

“Of course, Ren.” 

“I am waiting with bated breath,” the Knight had snorted and locked his mask back in place, smile and kiss swollen lips hidden once again by the projection of unpredictability. 

After that, Ren had not been unpredictable anymore. He had shown up, as if on cue, the night after Hux had successfully guided the  _ Finalizer _ through a gravitation jump. 

He even had brought wine. And oil. Surprisingly thoughtful and so responsive when Hux had returned the favor of a good thorough fuck. They had lau-

 

Hux felt the scream a second before he heard it, a wave of anguish that hit before the sound made it past the cockpit door and he was on his feet and running before it faded.

Around her, a standard issue blanket pooled like a dress she never got to wear. For most the blankets were too small, too thin. Mia vanished in the gray folds. 

If her tears were a trap, Hux would fall in without second thought. They weren’t. He still fell. Her thin arms reached out, giving voice to all the things her sobs strangled. “‘m s’rry,” the only discernible feature in a helpless jumble of consonants. 

Decades ago, a boy Hux barely remembered being, had cried like this when he had been bundled into a spaceship, forced to leave everything he loved behind, to be shipped with his mother to places unknown. She had cried too, but Hux couldn’t remember seeking comfort. She wouldn’t have welcomed it. His mother had cried for the loss of everything she cherished. Status, a big house, wealth. Her son had been something still with her, something, though, Hux suspected, she could have done without. 

Awareness of the cruelty of his thoughts didn’t go in hand with shame. Neither of his parents had been ideal in their selfish drive. Both of them, though, were reason for Hux to try to do better. 

Brendol Hux II. was, as a person, inadequately prepared to deal with children and though he knew that  _ What would Kylo Ren do? _ was an ill-advised course of action in most cases, in this, it seemed the only one open to him.

The memory of a little boy with ginger hair curled in stark contrast against Ren’s robe was the silent touchstone he turned to when straight ahead was not an option, a dead-born memory of a man he had never been allowed to be. Ren had had that chance. Ben Solo had been born into something other than bare duty and it showed in all the little ways that had been hurt by Snoke. In so many other little ways where he extended emotion towards Hux, deviating from a logical, practical course of action. Kylo Ren had been loved once and it had enabled him to love, had re-enabled him with his father’s sacrifice. 

The only thing that had ever enabled Hux had been the chance to close his fingers around his own father’s throat. Ren, once more. 

 

_ What would Ren do? _ Hux though and found himself sitting on the cot to let her climb in his lap, curling against his chest for what meager protection there might be found. He wrapped his arms around her heaving shoulders like Ren had done with another child in Hux’s memories until the worst of her sobs subsided. 

“He says, he’ll kill you,” she finally whispered, almost too soft against his neck.

“Who?” Hux asked, but he already knew.

“Snoke.” Mia’s voice dropped even more as if speaking too loud would summon him. 

A man who knew about feelings would have offered her kind words, consolation in her nightmares. 

“Did he want to know where we are?” 

The nod against his chest was imperceptible, slow and hesitant. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered again. “He said, he wouldn’t kill you if I told him.”

“So you told him?” She was five years old, barely, he couldn’t expect her to understand the kind of lies Snoke spun to make people do his bidding. Just like Hux Sr., Snoke was someone whose approach of any means was not hindered by morals. But Miaro Ren was too young to know a difference. 

“No.” She looked up and pulled phlegm up her nose, unperturbed as only children were, by the horrendous sound. “I don’t want to go back.”

Hux saw her eyes, those luminous, weird eyes of endless depth in the hazel color, gray-ish green highlights spreading around the pupils in a starburst pattern as if she had a flower painted on the white of her iris, and he understood. She knew. She already understood what had taken Ren 15 years and the death of his father to learn. 

“You won’t have to. I’d rather die.” Hux smiled. “Alright?”

This time her smile for him spread hesitantly, but she leaned into him, curled inward like a little Loth-cat. 

“No matter what he promises you, Mia, he can’t hurt you in your dreams and he can’t find you if you don’t tell him.”

“I won’t,” she promised in all sincerity, unique to those who didn’t yet know how easy it was to commit treason and without an answer to her innocent conviction, he was left carding his finger through her hair, trying not to think of everything that could go wrong. 

She spoke up, minutes later, after two steadying breaths that collected courage for her. Still, her eyes stayed carefully averted.

“I don’t want to sleep again.”

He should make her, should put her to bed and tell her that ‘I don’t want to’ was not for soldiers to say. Instead, he picked her up, blanket and all and carried her to the galley. 

_ What would Ren do?  _

Not this, probably. 

Her eyes glimmered as Hux sat down at the galley’s lone table and put an uncharged blaster rifle in front of her. 

“This,” he said, with a voice that never failed to command a subordinate’s attention. “is an F-11D blaster rifle. Built by Sonn-Blas. Every rifle needs to be cleaned regularly to be kept in good working order. For that, we need to take it apart. Understood so far?”

“We’re taking it apart!” she piped up and Hux smiled.

“Correct. Watch and learn, little soldier.”

“Yes, sir!”

 

***

 

“Tell me again, Mia,” Hux said, kneeling before her on the ground in front of her cot.

“I will stay here. I will not let anybody in. I will not push a button. I will keep the blaster pistol nearby and when someone tries to enter I shoot them. I will…” She broke off, face scrunched in concentration as she trailed after an elusive thought. “I think that’s it.”

Mia’s fingers curled in Hux’s hands, her lips curling in response to Hux’s involuntary smile.

“Eat something, when I take too long. Sleep. Do the exercises on the datapad.”

“And don’t meditate.”

“And don’t meditate,” Hux agreed and brushed a strand of her dark hair behind her ear.

“Yes, Hux,” she said and smiled, unable or unwilling to keep her distance. Hux wondered if anyone had ever been nice to her. It was the only explanation for the way she had latched onto him.

“I’ll see you later.”

 

As the landing ramp lowered and Hux walked out, a pair of maintenance droids closed in. A thousand credits for a paint job. Desperate prices. Sadly, Hux was a desperate man. All around him the acrid smell of metal, oil and the reek of biologicals in various states of unwashedness settled in a vivid miasma of decay and despair, welcoming them as one of their own.

They wished, he thought in the second before the cacophony of random and contradicting sounds hit him.

He did not turn to look back and see if the girl had done as ordered and stayed out of sight, he simply closed the ramp and walked into the chaos of the space station. One hour, he told himself, then he would be back, the droids would be done and they would leave, long before any reinforcements could arrive, even if someone reported them to the First Order.

 

***

 

They did not have child appropriate clothing in the half legal shops that littered the main street of Ljiabra Asteroid Station. Unsurprising. But they did have stuffed toys, cheap puzzles, and horrendous dolls because obviously even pirates had children and children had demands.

Hux chose a black wolf for the girl, amused by a faint thread of humor that he hadn't had a chance to miss in the past months. He threw in some sweets, three shirts in the smallest available size, brushes for their teeth, scissors for her hair and hair color for him. Some oil and a disgustingly dirty cap hid his hair well enough for a short visit, but it would not do down the line.

When he was done, he felt the cashier's attention acutely. 

“This is no place for a child, my friend.”

Hux pondered how low-key he could get rid of the man. The counter was high enough to prove a true obstacle and the cameras in the corner were not even remotely hidden.

“Tell that to his mother's people,” Hux gave in response, drawn vowels a cheap attempt to hide the core accent. Someone would come looking probably, for an Imperial officer and a little girl, not a smuggler and his son. The man’s face draw taut in sympathy with another once over of Hux’s body. “You’re a good pilot?”

“Adequate, “ Hux said and the next moment wanted to slap himself for the slip in language.

“Core military? “ the cashier's, likely owner’s eyes sharpened.

There were a thousand planets out there that Hux could have given as his point of origin, but only one he could convincingly depict. His mother, before her death, had sometimes told him of her home, the smells and sound and the brilliance of the galaxy's best shipyards. “Corellia,” he said and looked away, as a man might who had lost the only home he'd ever known.

So now someone would remember a Corellian man on the run with his son from his wife. It was a laughable disguise. It sat easy on him. It didn't matter if it was cast in doubt later, it needed to hold now.

“Listen, man... “ Hux felt the shop owner’s eyes on him, weighing a decision before he shrugged. “a friend of mine has a little operation going in the neutral zone. Nice planet, off the usual routes. It's as legal as they go. Transport ‘n stuff, but he doesn't ask questions for good pilots.”  Bowing down he started to scribble on a stained piece of plast paper. “If you want a fresh start with your kid that doesn't involve places like Ljiabra.” 

The paper felt oily when Hux took it, dirty in a way everything here felt, with a loss of innocence and honesty permeating every surface.

This was a place he would be easy to find, sticking out like a sore thumb with a kid on his hand. It was not a place he wanted to bring a kid to begin with.

A backwater planet, though... Salk, the paper said. A pilot's life, honest work… it was the last thing anybody would ever connect with Brendol Hux II and a daughter of Ren.

He smiled

“What do I owe you?” Hux asked, not really caring for the price.

Only as he turned to leave did the man behind the counter speak again.

“Hey, what shall I tell my friend your name is?” oh, of course, he would probably get a provision for referring a pilot if Hux showed up.

“Bren,” he said with a smile, the name coming easy over his lips because nobody had called him that, ever. “Antilles. “ a good Corellian name. Rebellion hero, too. And the name of Leia Organa’s adopted mother, but that was not why he had chosen it. “I’m Sigurd, “ came the answer with a good-natured nod. “Good luck, mate.”

 

***

 

Stepping back into the artificial silence of the shuttle, Hux found Mia sitting on the same cot where he left her. There was no need to implore. She had not moved.

It was a sad testament to her life that a five-year-old was this good at following orders. Still, Hux was glad. It made a lot of things much easier. 

“I brought you something.” 

Hux crouched down in front of her, suspiciously eyed, and produced first the stuffed wolf, then a bag of sweets. Blatant bribery. A true parent might have balked at both, but Hux was anything but, saddled with a child that had no concept of being a child. 

“Thank you,” Mia murmured. Her arms closed around the pet with silent reverence, unsure of her permission to touch, to react, yet smiling when Hux opened his mind to her and let her feel what she could not know by herself. 

 


	3. Chapter 3

“That’s him?”

Hux blinked sleepily from his position at Ren’s shoulder and for the first time his lips quirked up as he saw the holo stream. “Yes. Those were his first steps. My mother recorded them for me. It was…”

Laying in bed, naked with Kylo Ren, looking at videos of his son. Secret contraband smuggled to him when his mother had still been alive. She had never quite agreed with his father on the treatment of children, but she had been too indifferent, too weak to do anything, either for him or for Andras.

It was, he thought, nothing but a meaningless recording of a chubby red-haired boy holding onto a table as he placed step after step with the greatest care. And then he looked up, right into the camera and smiled.

Hux was aware of having made the sound this time as the smile predictably eviscerated him. But Ren’s hand was there, heavy on his hair, brushing back the strands as if it meant something. It meant nothing. He wasn’t the one who had saved his son, had Ren not…

“Hey, Hux… do you know why hostages are taken?”

Hux answered without thinking. “To disable those who could do something about it.”

“Yes,” Ren said. “Exactly.” He smiled. “He disabled you. I dealt with it. End of story. He is safe.”

“Yes,” Hux murmured and looked at the wobbly steps of the child in the holo again. “Good thing you are too dumb to extract payment. I could never repay you.”

Ren had laughed, dropped the datapad and pulled Hux on top of him. “About that…”

Idiot…

 

***

 

Dolmen Salvos was a man of ordinary disposition. He was neither overly tall nor exceptionally broad, but well muscled in the way most workers are. Carrying his weight balanced deep on his hips with both feet steadfast on the ground he showed he was a fighter, though he lacked the easy grace of someone who fought for a living. A fact that had not escaped the three thugs that were presently threatening him at gunpoint.

“It is easy,”one of the three said. “You pay, you walk. If you have debts, you need to make them go away.”

Hux pondered turning around.

“Tell, Ethan-” Dolmen set out, but he was silenced by a heavy-meated fist.

In the oppressive hum of the dry heat inside Dolmen’s storehouse the smell of blood was a sudden, bright flaring insult, sharp enough to break through the faint ammonium scent that clung to Hux’s hair.

Turning around would be the most sensible option. Outside on the airfield a First Order shuttle stood, barely hidden between heaps of threadbare metal. Inside this shuttle sat Mia, patiently waiting for Hux’s return with a trust that was scaring him. She didn’t doubt that he knew what he did, even though she must be able to feel the anxious flare whenever Hux thought of the unfamiliar expanse of a Galaxy he had not been raised to actually face without a weapon between them.

At his side his blaster was a familiar weight, one he had refused to part with, knowing full well it gave away his identity to anybody with enough wits and knowledge. A standard First Order officer’s blaster, coded to his fingerprints. A fine weapon. A symbol and token of a useless oath. Order.

Aside from that: a working blaster.

Salvos’ eyes twitched and Hux smiled.

“Gentlemen…” the heat curled around his voice in the warehouse’s dim light, lend it a certain quality of darkness when they whirled around to stare into the barrel of his gun.

Ten steps between assured his opponents that any of them could be the recipient of his first shot. They knew.

“Isn’t it awfully hot, gentlemen, to be so aggressive this early in the day,” Hux took two carefully measured steps, moving closer to a heavy rack. “I am sure Mr. Salvos understood your message and will undertake adequate measures to rectify the situation. Won’t he, Mr. Salvos?”

“He surely will,” sounded a breathless answer and Hux found the mild eyes of his target behind the thugs shoulders, ignoring their dumbfounded looks.

Brute muscle lacking the capacity to think outside set parameters. Too dumb to think for themselves.

“Move,” Hux snarled. “Or I’ll kill you. Or is that too complicated for you?”

The men had turned fully now, staring at him as if he suddenly had turned blue in front of their eyes, unable to grasp the sheer audacity of his existence. Bullies, then.

Behind them Dolmen Salvos reached for a hydro-spanner, an arm-long monstrosity that…

Hux would have given them one last chance to move. Salvos, it seemed, didn’t have that patience. The first of the thugs fell before the other even registered something was wrong. The second dropped to Hux’s blaster. The third, in the process of raising his arms in surrender, was felled by Salvos’ fist to his face.

It was not fair by a long stretch, but since they had thought it was a good thing to go three on one, Hux’s conscience kept suspiciously silent.

None of the three were dead. That was something they could always take care of later. When he had assessed the situation, and determined whether or not he needed them alive.

“So… “ he holstered his blaster and tried for a smile and a trustworthy expression. “Your friend Sigurd said you need a pilot.”

Salvos stepped around the bodies, head tilted with curiosity, coming closer as Hux went on.

“But considering that,” Hux gestured to the men on the ground, “maybe you rather need someone to sort out your business.”

“That?” Salvos pointed over his shoulder and laughed without care about the fresh blood that dripped down his chin. “My business runs smooth as a well-oiled machine. That’s the problem. Ethan needs to get rid of me to keep his monopoly.”

Stopping in front of Hux he held out his hand.

“I am just too good, my friend, and that never sits well with the inferior. Dolmen Salvos.” Hux clasped the offered hand in what he thought was a good approximation of civilian traditions.

“Bren Antilles.” Hux had spent three hours taking the new name to a man with light brown hair and brows who wore a pair of threadbare smugglers pants and soldier’s boots to a formerly nice dress shirt that was now smeared with grease and rust. A smuggler’s name that still felt not quite right on his lips. “Nice to meet you.”

”No,” Dolmen laughed, “the pleasure is wholly mine. I owe you an unbroken jaw and a working hand or two.”

  


They conducted a job interview standing between the bodies of three unconscious men and Hux dished out a carefully constructed story about horrible in-laws and an unstable ex-wife. A story that worked on a thousand different planets and needed neither exact places nor proof to hold up.

“You’re an ex-military pilot?”

“Actually no,” this was a point where he kept to the truth if only to keep it simple. “I am more of an organizer and supervisor. I am exactly the person you need to get rid of your friend Ethan. Let me prove it to you.”

Dolmen expression changed, something mildly predatory crossing his features, a clear interest that did not fit a small entrepreneur on a backwater planet.

“And someone like that has trouble with their ex-wife?”

“It happens to the best.”

“I don’t believe you,” Dolmen said without deeper inflection.

That was not the answer Hux had hoped for but in the grand scheme of things…

“Do you have to?” He asked and was rewarded with a deep bellowing laugh that shook Dolmen’s shoulders like a minor quake.

“To be honest? No. I don’t care who you have problems with, as long as those problems are not mine. Are they?”

“No.” Hux shook his head.

“That’s what I thought.”

“You shouldn’t have given your desperation for good personnel away so easily. It will drive my bargain up.” Though Hux knew it wouldn’t. Not for him. He needed all of this too much and more. Mia needed it.

On Dolmen’s desk, a row of pictures told a tale of a happy family with two children and a pretty Twi’lek wife. They stood in front of a modest house with a garden and it was all that Hux had never had, not even before everything had crumbled to dust. And for Mia?

A day ago they had watched a holo-show about the forest animals of Endor, cheapest standard fare geared toward the easily impressed and massively bored and she had sat in rapt attention, clutching Hux’s hand with not a word passing between them until it was over. Then she had begged him to show her more of a world outside walls and Star Destroyers.

“If you’re worth it,” Dolmen’s words broke up the faint anger that found not yet a true expression or understanding in Hux’s thoughts, “and I mean not just as a pilot, there is a second house on my land. I keep it as secondary quarters in case one of my pilots needs it, but honestly, it just stands empty. You and your kid can have it… once I’m convinced you didn’t just abduct him.”

“Her,” Hux answered with a faint smirk, knowing full well the lie he had told Sigurd.

“Not what my info said.”

“I am not stupid enough to tell every passing acquaintance the truth, my friend.” Hux let the smile slip. “Because I am worth it.”

If Dolmen noticed the emphasis in Hux’s words he didn’t remark on it, his gaze stayed fixed on Hux’s and finally he nodded.

“Very well, two weeks probationary period, both as a pilot and what do you want to call it?”

“Chief of Security. I am fond of expressive titles.” He had been, Hux thought and took the offered hand. There was something to be said about unmistakable authority.

“Very well then. You have two weeks to prove yourself, Bren.”

Hux needed less than three days. It was laughably easy once he started to acquaint himself with the area, the planet, the power players. Once he met Dolmen’s perfect little family and his perfectly wonderful wife that had a mouth on her that made each of her husband’s pilots blush. Ti’lera knocked on his door bare three hours after they moved in to introduce herself and offer to teach Mia along with her own children and a few others.

Hux declined, but it was the first stone.

He found Dolmen in his overflowing office in the warehouse by the landing strip a bare 10 Minutes from home. Mia lay in her bed, exhausted after watching yet another documentary, asking him more questions than the lecturers at the academy, and hopefully still asleep.

Fine layers of dust swirled in the early evening sun that streamed through the windows in fine, golden rays.

Each of these window sat above the first story level, difficult to access from the ground and Hux had to give it to the man, he had made the best possible use of singular ready-to-build elements and formed them into something that possessed at least a minimum of basic security.

The wide flowing meadows that stretched for miles around the small settlement that nestled around the landing strip had not yet woken from their forced rest during the day’s hottest hours. Salk’s climate might be mild, as Dolmen had assured Hux, but the height of summer was still extreme some days.

Hux had grown up on starships and spent a good part of his last five years on an ice planet. He was unimpressed. Mia on the other hand spent hours outside, sitting under a fruit tree in the grass, watching tiny creatures crawl about, digging her hands into the earth, talking to trees.

Seeing the world through her eyes, her father in hindsight appeared almost normal. But then, what did Hux know of normal? Hux knew how to be a soldier, it was the only thing he had ever been before Kylo Ren had come crashing into his life and taught him how to be a lover. And now Mia…

“There live bugs in that tree. And they have families. Little bugs…” What did he know of raising a child?

Well, he couldn’t be worse than his own father. He couldn’t botch this more than he had botched Andras’ life.

So he let her talk to trees and bugs when they were alone and he sat on the back door steps of the container they called a house and watched the news on his datapad, desperately searching for a glimpse of black hair framing white skin and the brilliant glow of a lightsaber.

Ben Solo should be a Republican news darling. Instead, it was as if he didn’t exist.

It was all so far away.

Snoke. Ren. The First Order and the Republic.

Dolmen’s problems were so insignificant. And yet so important.

 

“I will be honest with you, Dolmen.”

Hux leaned in the doorway to the office and watched his boss work his way through shipping manifests with a seriousness that might belong to the core worlds, not a backwater planet in the Neutral Zone. “You need to get rid of him.”

 

Dolmen looked up from below his lashes, ejected a datachip and pushed in a new one, looking back down, composing an ode with his silence.

 

“The problem is not,” Hux continued and pushed away from the door, “that you make more money than him. The problem is that you are his mirror and he looks bad. He came here a few years ago with burnt bridges and some dodgy stooges, setting himself up as the king of Waywatertown and he made it good. The First Order needed smugglers to get contraband into their territory and they paid well. He owned the town, he owned the people and his men could do whatever they wanted and nobody stopped them.”

 

Now Hux had Dolmen’s attention and the shadow of a pleased smile that lurked in the corner of his mouth.

 

“But living off cheap alcohol, whores and violence is not a life goal for most. Even if the core of his men wants things to stay that way, most don’t. They want a semblance of safety, families, places to call their own. It’s really not complicated, but the first thing your wife did was offer schooling for Mia. The first thing you did was to offer me a place to stay.

All this…” Hux’s hand painted an arch that included the warehouse, the landing strip outside and possibly the modest settlement around them. “Has an air of permanence, of order that Ethan can’t offer, can’t understand, and that is why you will always get the sober pilots, the better trained pilots. You will lose less to stealing and forgery. You will at some point get more lucrative contracts as the First Order moves out of the shadow of illegality and pushes towards the core.”

Here, Hux paused, pondered. But with the destruction of the Hosnian system those paths were blazed wide open and that was not really a secret. The Republican fleet was destroyed and the First Order had the upper hand in that regard.

“And even if they are stopped, the Republic needs to move in to hold them back. Ethan’s operation is unsustainable in the long haul whereas yours is set up for success.” Hux shrugged and watched Dolmen’s smile bloom, he wasn’t even flattering much. He had heard enough about the way Dolmen conducted business and he saw enough on a trip to Waywatertown to buy supplies for Mia to piece together the unsubtle reality.

“But he doesn’t see it that way. He treats all this like a king does inherited lands: as property, not as a privilege that is earned. I thought he might be paid off, brought into reason, but he is not interested in co-existence. He needs to go.”

Dolmen’s gaze rested on Hux, calm like a pleasant spring morning and Hux found himself wondering what the man had done before someone took offense with his non-human partner. “I don’t do wet work to solve my problems, Bren.” A fine thread of tension ran through his words and Hux found himself smiling thinly.

“Anymore.”

At that Dolmen’s eyes narrowed an increment, drew in on Hux’s face, before Dolmen bowed his head in acknowledgement. “It is as you said, we all want something else at some point.”

“Safety.”

They stared at each other over the cramped space of the office, recognizing the blood on each other’s hands. Hux expected amusement at the thought of his own bodycount in comparison to this man’s. It didn’t happen. Whether a man drowned in a pond or the ocean...at some point the depth of the blood made no difference anymore. All that set them apart had been opportunity for mass destruction and a deep running blindness, but even without that he had been groomed for murder from birth, brought up to follow an ideology, words, instead of the truth.

“An end to the killing, Bren. We need to stop at some point or we’ll drown in blood.”

Hux grimaced.

“I will bring Mia over to your house tomorrow.”

 

***

 

How horrible to have to force a child into impractical clothing to give her a chance to fit in with her peers. Take away the clean lines that resembled a soldier’s basic layer, add colors. She looked at him as if he were a madman.

“Blue or red?” “Both”

Hux dressed her in violet.

“Alright, you little Lothrat, what is the list?”

Mia Antilles stood in the middle of their living room and, in between cheap sets of pre-fabricated furniture, still managed to look absolutely magical.

“I am Mia Antilles. I am five. I do not talk about my mother. I do not hit anybody. I do not talk about S…,” her eyes flitted over Hux face, her words breaking on a name she hadn’t spoken again after that first night on the shuttle, not even when she woke from nightmares. “Do I have to say his name?” She asked and when Hux shook his head, Mia scrunched up her nose. “I do not talk about anybody and I do not Force around. Ever.”

Crouching in front of her, Hux was close enough to brush back her hair with a smile. She was different from everything he knew. Hux couldn’t help but wonder if she was different from Andras, too. With detached clarity he knew that, no, she wasn’t, but he lacked the experience to draw parallels and he lacked the right to find out. Yet.

“And…?” He gently prompted while straightening the bright shirt with the single star over her black pants. The shirt was two sizes too large, just enough to gall him, though he knew from a practical standpoint, he didn’t want to buy another set of clothes in two months time.

Neither of them were particularly acquisitive and the only thing Mia truly loved was her stuffed wolf. She called it Ren and Hux had noone to blame for that but himself. Had he not responded quite as openly to her unbridled joy, his thoughts might not have slipped.

“Aaaand…” Her eyes narrowed as she stared at him, her thoughts a light inquisitive touch on the border of his. Even lacking the ability to slap her mental fingers, he still was apt enough at evading mindreaders - thank you, Ren- to send her one, sharp image that consisted of “No!”

“No mindreading!” With the gap-toothed smile that broke over her face it was impossible to begrudge her the attempt at evasion. They both knew. They both decided to ignore it.

“And if you are very good and do not break the rules, Mia?”

“We will do training,” she responded in silent reverence, a child that looked forward to a treat. “Can we do armed combat?”

“Whatever you like, Birdlet.” Hux said, the knowledge that he should be disturbed tugging at heartstrings he thought long since clipped, and opened his arms to let her climb into them.

“Force training?” That came as whisper, a dangerous secret.

“If you behave.”

“I will, sir,” said, without salute, but her arms slung around his neck.

Hux had not made any attempt to hide his preparations from her, had seen no reason to insult her in addition to everything else.

“I depend on you, little soldier,” he said, basking in her father’s brilliant smile.

 

***

 

Hux walked into the warehouse at next morning’s dawn to find Dolmen sitting behind his desk once more and himself in the focus of the man’s far too knowing eyes.

“There has been a fire last night in Waywatertown I heard. Big thing,” Hux said while his fingers already flipped through the list of available tours. He marked his name behind an easy two day round trip to Dantooine to pick up seeds. Only then did he finally look up and meet Dolmen’s gaze. “Me and the squirrel will be away for a few days then.”

 

***

 

As he walked through the warm morning, the wind tousling his hair, he found that his arms were no longer white. The skin had turned into a soft honeyed color afflicted with a hundred freckles. Ten days off a ship, fourteen since defection he was a different man already. His officer’s blaster sat snugly against the small of his back, hidden by an overlarge linen shirt that hang loosely on his lighter frame. In the window of Dolmen’s door, a face stared at him, lightly scruffed, the brown hair now fitting with a darker tone of skin. A whole human with fitting parts.

Ti’lara opened and looked at him with the suspicion of a parent that caught a pretender. “Mia can't read,” she said in lieu of a greeting.

”Then that will change,” Hux answered after only a second’s surprise. It made sense that Snoke didn't care for education before he cared for obedience.

“Did she behave?”

In the depth of the house, nothing fancy, nothing large but everything warm in a way that was wholly foreign to him, he heard children's laughter coming closer.

“Like an angel, but Bren… “

“There is a reason she is here.” He cut her off and the look on his face and the patter of small fett stopped further discussion.

“Aunt Ti scolded me that you can't read Mia.”

“I can’t. Tivan can.”

“Then we'll have to change that. Allright? “

Her hand slipped into his with her gaze fixed on his face as if she hadn't expected him to return.

“Alright.”

“We have a job, won't be around for two days. Have a nice day, Ti’lara.”

Dolmen's wife waved after Mia, not Hux, as they crossed the path to their own lodgings. Mia bounced next to him, the wind brushing through her hair. It whipped the fine strands against her face and her smile, curling around the fine slope of her nose and caught on her lips, tangling into the low tones of her giggle. Her skin barely had left the milky whiteness of space behind; like her father she would always look like a contrast painting. “Tivan calls Dolmen Papa. Can I call you something too?”

“Yes,” Hux said and it felt natural. Not killing a man in his cold blood after flooding his hideout with an improvised concoction of poisonous gas from a shuttle engine. This.

 

Mia learned the letters sitting on his lap in Hyperspace, eating chocolate from his fingers with careless laughter. Maybe he shouldn't indulge her sweet tooth quite as much, but she was the only one he could indulge.

 

She learned how to change her grip on a knife with a flip as they waited for docking above Dantooine and pelted him with soft, Force-slung balls and howling laughter on their way back.

 

They were barely halfway back when Mia woke screaming again, clutching to Hux’s shoulders with wracking sobs and the fear rattling her frame could break grown men apart. Hux carried her to the pilot seat, wrapped in a blanket and told her a story.

“There once was a great General of the Republic,” he started, her head a soft, unbearably heavy weight on his shoulder, too heavy for her young age and there was nothing he could do about it, no weapons he could hand her, but the unlikeliest of all. “He was a hero, cunning warrior and the best pilot in the Galaxy. His name was Anakin Skywalker…”

 

***

 

Some things Hux had shed the moment he had activated the Hyperdrive with the _Finalizer_ vanishing behind him. Some, he just could not.

5 am. The jingle of Coruscant main news. Through the window streamed the first tentative rays of high summer morning sun, painted everything with an ephemeral metallic blue touch and around him the thin sheet he used in place of a blanket had tangled in tight knots.

 

He listened, while he moved his limbs to dislodge the fabric, to the morning news, the same professional voice of Chandra Salowna every day for the past six years. She talked about the referendum that had passed in the interim Senate, about the next big military contract the Republic had opened bidding on, a horrible chemical accident on Mandalore that some suspected was a terrorist attack by warring clans.

 

By the time Chandra reached Galactic traffic announcements, Hux sat on the hard mattress, cool morning air caressing his naked shoulders.

He listened to the daily commentary by Tebchak Col, political correspondent on Coruscant, while he showered - 6 minutes without shaving -, dressed and brewed the first, sacred cup of Corellian caf. There were things in his closet. Three pairs of pants, colored brown. Shirts, not quite white anymore. Two high necked that needed to be worn open, lest it looked too much like uniform and two v-shaped. One short sleeved, one long sleeved of each. Two pairs of combat boots. He owned ten pairs of socks in different colors and patterns. Every night, Mia selected a pair for him to wear and he never complained. It was rare now, weeks later, that he had to rescind her selection and wear one of the regulation grey pairs he still owned, because he needed the safety that familiarity brought over the illicit thrill of color.

 

The First Order’s propaganda channel and the local semi-professional news station came back to back while Hux sat outside on the steps behind the living container, drinking coffee and watched the sun rise above the hills , his gaze firmly fixed on the horizon.

Sometimes he told Kylo Ren about his daughter, hoping that, wherever he was, he knew.

 

He started working at six, logging into the company system, downloading flight plans, shipping lists and general complaints. Hux loved to spend his second cup of coffee drafting memos to the pilots, updating or blacklisting business partners in the spaceports Dolmen served.

He hadn’t had to dispatch someone to beat up any of Ethan’s remaining croonies in four weeks. A resounding success.

 

By the time he woke Mia the dispatches were through and the next battlefield waiting.

She was curled up on her side, face haloed by black hair. Around her a blanket was tucked tightly, clutched to her chest, along with the pet wolf, by small hands and an attitude that she never showed in waking.

She cherished every minute of sleep and hated every instance of waking up. Not being awake, only the process.

Hux brushed back her baby soft hair and placed a bowl with breakfast mush with fruits on the nightstand next to her head.

“Hey, Squirrel. The sun is shining. The birds are asking where you are and so is Ti’Lara.”

He listened to her grumbles, he watched her eat, helped her out of bed and into her clothes and by the time they left the house she was reasonably present, if not yet cheerful. But he had only ever promised to deliver a child, never a good natured one to class.

 

Jaya walked past him as he crossed over the tarmac to the warehouse. On her way out already, datapad in hand and if Hux assessed correctly, she had chosen the smugglers run, her small Correlian Freighter faster than any of their other ships. She smiled. He nodded politely, conscious of her irritated frown at his attitude. After two months, she really should be used to it.

Taz didn’t give a damn either way. He greeted Hux as he walked past, threw him a short snippet of information - “We got some pilots to vet. Have fun.” - and was gone. He didn’t expect smiles or small talk, an all around pleasant co-worker. Efficient.

By eight Hux sat at the tiny corner desk, Dolmen in sight, responsibility at his fingertips, far from where he had been, but saddled with just enough of a challenge to enjoy it. The unfamiliarity added a layer of difficulty that would wear thin soon enough, but in the end he was not working for the fun of it.

“Taz reported a fresh debris field two light years outwards around the Ilum route.”

“That wasn’t there a week ago.” Hux looked up with interest. “And neither Republic nor FO reported any fights.”

“Hell if I know what those bastards are up to.” Dolmen shrugged and threw up his hands. “As long as they leave me alone…”

“Except with work, of course,” Hux said and turned back to his reports. “You should ponder selling information to the Republic. The First Order are closing in and they don’t tend to ask before they take. Now you still have ways to get a backdoor to protection in case things sour.”

“You know, Bren…. You have a very special brand of paranoia and pessimism…. I already have contacts to the Resistance.”

At that Hux grinned. “You pay me to be your paranoia and pessimism. No matter how good your contact is, make it better. It costs you nothing but a little care in handling. Someone should miss a ship. Ships that are missed have cargo. Cargo has value and what the First Order values tells people with half a brain what they’re up to. You want people to take notice of what the Order is up to, it will bring you business.”

Dolmen viewed him with that half smile of his and dipped his head in acknowledgment.

“Do you ever think straight forward?”

Hux laughed and took the compliment at face value. “When things are, yes.”

“It could have been a First Order ship.”

“Why would they blow up their own ships?”

The way Dolmen raised his eyebrow sent an icy shiver down Hux’s spine. Their eyes met over their respective data screens on a shallow breath and a nod.

“I’ll put out some feelers with the scavengers. They should at least be able to clear up the affiliation,” Hux said.

“I’ll talk to my contacts,” Dolmen agreed and they sunk back into amicable silence.

With Ethan’s death they had an influx of work and of potential employees, colorful figures from actual former military personnel to low lives with teeth even worse than their manners and turning those down proved to be one of the more interesting parts of Hux’s job.

It was nothing like Starkiller base or his ship but in the secret moments when traffic slowed to a lull he had to admit that it sometimes was outright fun.

When he crossed over the tarmac again in the lazy afternoon heat, the grass gently rustling in the cool southern wind, birds tweeting exotic melodies and the smell of ripe fruit in the air, he sometimes did something outrageously luxurious like stopping for a minute to just breathe. This, when he was between responsibilities, was when he didn’t miss the confines of his uniform.

  
  


That uniform had for so long been the one fixture in his life, the fallback that had kept him together during the night cycles, when the ship was silent and Hux was alone,  his only occupation waiting for Ren in the knowledge that Ren might as well not come home again.

 

“You are pathetic. An embarrassment to the First Order and Supreme Leader Snoke like this,” Hux’s voice had echoed through the _Finalizer_ ’s med bay, distorted into vengeful howling by rust red blood dotted metal doors, yet Kylo Ren hadn’t even had the decency to look up, had only buried deeper into the pitiful remnants of his cloak, as if Hux hadn’t been able to hear his sobs.

As if he hadn’t been afraid himself. Ren was Snoke’s prized pupil, his beloved pet. Hux? Hux had only been Commandant of an annihilated weapon and Ren’s bed pet and if someone had to take that fall….

“You won’t,” He had heard Ren sob through the thick layer of cloth. “I won’t let him. Not you, too.”

“You can’t stop him, Ren.” Ren had turned in the dim twilight of the room, had stared at Hux with his half destroyed face and a lopsided smile that had been too wrong, yet so much more fitting than all the cruelty Ren had played at before.

“I just sacrificed my father at his feet, Hux, and I’ll have to sacrifice my mind as well if he has his way.” On Ren’s skin flaking blood was washed away by tears and smeared on as of yet unmarked skin, until he looked like a Naboo theatre performance gone wrong and yet…

“Oh,” Hux has said and under the safe cover of contempt understanding had bloomed.

“I feel too much. And I mustn’t.” In the darkness the raw rasp of Ren’s voice stumbled through the embarrassing counterpoint of his words like a dying man through snow, leaving an unmistakable trail of heartsblood in his wake.

“And if you don’t help me, Hux, you will get a perfect puppet and I will never embarrass you again with gratuitous confessions like: ‘I love you’, Hux, and I don’t want to loose this, so please... I will never talk to you about it again, but please help me.’”

They had fucked their way through every surface in both their quarters. They had spent months locked in competition for the attention of a distant monster in search for promises of glory, they had sat through nights and drank, discussing politics and strategy, but never had Ren uttered a syllable. Never had Hux dared think of it, think past the requirements of duty and occasional physical release. But who else could Ren ask?

Asking Hux alone was immeasurable risk. Ren knew full well that Hux needed every leverage to come out of the political fallout of Starkiller’s loss relatively unscathed. But Ren wasn’t a creature of logic by a long shot.

“What do you need?” Hux heard himself say, managing just so to appear calm and professional and not cursing himself as he inwardly was.

 

***

 

The storm came at night, rattled over the low planes of Salk with the ferocity of a wild animal.

Curled loosely into his light blanket Hux woke with a nightmare gasp still lingering on his lips, red light that flooded in through the windows burnt like a shadow on the back of his eyelids.

The plastcrete walls of their house shook under the ceaseless battering of wind and hail, but all around him was nothing but blessed darkness. Weather was one of those liabilities Hux just never got quite used to. There had been Starkiller, of course, but there the weather had been carefully control and consistent, not unlike their spaceships. This, though?

 

He pushed the blanket off and pulled on light linen pants, the only thing bearably in the sweaty night air inside the house. Maybe later he could open the windows, after the storm blew over and let cooler air inside. Plastcrete was very climatically consistent, but even that could only go so far with the heat their bodies carried inside with every opening of the door.

Under his bare feet the floor was cool, inviting him to linger. Inside his mind, red still overtook anything, making sleep an impossibility for now.

He just as well might work then.

 

Hux made his way into the hallway, passing the bath and Mia’s room when the sound stopped him. Not a scream. No sign of danger. Only a soft whimper drowning in the raging wind outside.

Inside Mia’s room he found her, curled up under the wobbly desk, her face pressed into the blanket to mute a sound that he now found was no whimper, but a choking, terrified scream.

“I’m sorry,” she cried, once more, curling deeper into the shadows under the table.

She had been well since they had settled on Salk, playing like children did, well behaved like they rarely were. She went to school and loved it almost as much as she loved Taz daughter. She was a child, one with a lot of power and already dangerous fighting abilities, but no longer a creature that existed solely to Snoke ‘s whims.

“Hey.” Murmuring, Hux dropped to the floor in front of her. It was the storm, it must be. Storms scared children. “Hey, Birdlet, everything is OK. It's just a storm.”

“Da!” she cried and was in his arms, shivering like a leaf in the raging wind. “I'm sorry,” she cried again, clinging to his shoulders. “I didn't… I'll be silent. I'll be silent again.” She hiccuped and curled into his arms as she had into the blanket, despite her words and promise.

“I never asked you to,” Hux said absentmindedly, his brain already following a trail that he didn't see just yet, but could guess at all too clearly. He had never heard her in distress, had never seen her in distress, but if someone would want to isolate her…

“Be as loud as you want, Birdlet.” He could promise her the moon, could promise her to never hurt her, to never abandon her time and time again, but in reality Snoke only needed the smallest insecurity to dig his claws in and once he had isolated her….

Hux sighed. Ren.

“Hey, Mia. Mia?” He tipped her chin up when she didn't move, locked his gaze squarely with hers.

“You can come to me at any time with anything. If you're scared? Fine. If you have a nightmare? Please, come see me right away. If nothing is going on and you just need a hug? Find me. I am your protector and I will drop everything if you come calling, Princess. I will not be angry if you don't, but I might get sad.” Hux brushed back her hair, punctuating the words with a soft kiss to her forehead.  “Alright?”

Mia’s nod was tentative, doubtful and shell-shocked still, as she flinched at yet another bang shaking the house. Perhaps a branch.

At least she listened.

“I can't convince you to trust me, I can only earn that, but I can promise you one thing: Snoke lies.” And because it had worked so splendidly with Ren, Snoke now tried it on his child as well. Truth be told, it hadn't  worked on Ren only. Snoke had alienated him from his family and given him an imaginary figure to worship, Darth Vader, but it hadn't honestly been that much different to what he did with the First Order. He had made them believe in the glory of the Empire, the wonderful order they represented, safety and security throughout. It seemed to be his _modus operandi_ , take away people's safety and then give them false idols to adore. But that, Hux thought, and pulled Mia tighter against him, was a game two could play as well.

“He tried that with your father, too. He lied to him and told him his parents didn't love him.” She flinched. “That he was a burden that dragged them down. That they were annoyed with him.” She flinched again and Hux sighed. Of course. Stupid him, to be so blue eyed to think that they were out of the worst. And then Snoke had probably told her she mustn’t disturb Hux with her fears, when she had been at her most vulnerable. Hux could see it now, ingenious in its simplicity.

“But you know what your father did?” He buried his lips in her hair, curved around her in a living protective wall, like the wall of words he was building. She smelled of earth of sweat and fear, of the shampoo that was scented after the small red fruits, she loved. “He broke free. Snoke told him lies and more lies, but your father stopped believing them and he walked away to fight against Snoke. He is even fighting him now. In secret. Snoke is afraid, that is why he comes after you. He tries to get you and use you against your Papa, because he is afraid of him and he thinks as soon as your Papa knows about you, he will drop everything and give up.”

Under his hands her heartbeat had slowed, her erratic breathing calmed. It wasn't fair to involve her, to burden her with that knowledge, but it would have been worse to leave her ignorant and defenseless as Ben Solo had been.

”Would he?” She whispered back at him, holding her breath in anticipation of the galaxy's biggest secret.

“Yes,” Hux sighed. “He would. No matter what Snoke would ask him to do, your father would do it.”

“Even if he had to hurt you?”

Trust the kid to cut to the heart of the matter. How many times had Snoke threatened Hux to assure Mia’s compliance? How many of her nights had been filled with horrors dished out plentiful by the monster with the long-fingered hands.

“Yes.” If lies were Snoke’s weapon, truth needed to be Hux's. “Because he knows I will do anything for you, too.”

“But I don't want you to die, Da!” The dam of her barely shored up control broke on the cry, her hands dug into his skin, testament to her heritage and an explanation for Kylo Ren’s tendency for violence in one.

“I won't.” Another promise. Hopefully one he could keep. “As long as we don't believe Snoke’s lies, he is without weapons. We will do like your father and?”

“Not believe him.” Her breathy whisper sounded like anything but conviction, but it was all Hux would get out of her on the floor of her dark bedroom with a storm screaming over them.

“And then kill him,” she added, shocking Hux into a snort of laughter.

Ren’s child.

 

***

 

Summer egged into an early autumn, the baking heat chased away by the storms and the wetness they brought.

Mia decided she was friends with the animals that lived in the meadows behind the house. She probably was, Hux thought as he watched her amble through the fields, crouching down to do whatever little girls did, who were caught in a net, tethered to everything that lived and unable to escape that burden.

“The Force wanted you to,” she tended to say by way of explanation for anything and everything and every moment of hindsight. Hux didn’t know about that, but he couldn’t feel but vindicated that he hadn’t just handed her over to the Resistance and Leia Organa. They had already managed to fuck up Ren by turning him into a plaything on the field of galactic politics, maybe though, that had been the Force, too.

Not a benevolent power, star studded breath of life, but a vindictive powerplayer that used its children as pawns in a game none of them knew the rules of.

If, then Hux had removed both of them from the board and he couldn’t help but feel a little proud. He had never not played. Neither had Mia.

It was… nice…

Looking down at his datapad, Hux snorted at his own hubris. The schematized visualizations of the First Order’s main hyperspace lanes mocked him in their perfect, from memory, recreation.

Hux might not be playing right now, but he sincerely doubted he could ever forget about the game itself.

 

***

 

He couldn’t. He came back from a short tour scouting a new route through Salk’s outlying asteroid belt in one of the small jumpers, high flying on excitement and the accomplishment of having made it.

Dolmen sat behind his desk as Hux walked in and for just a moment Hux faltered, remembered himself sitting like this, brow drawn in worry as he studied a report or another, already solving problems that hadn’t been identified yet.

Long ago, though in truth it had been little over three months. That man, that General, had existed solely for the purpose handed to him and when that purpose changed, that man had changed as well, expanded past the sharply drawn lines conceded to him, learned to breath and learned to live.

Now he stepped closer and dropped the datachip with the nav readout onto the desk with a carelessness he had thought himself incapable off.

“Good news… it is perfectly possible if you stick to the route and it will save you about a sixth of the fuel.”

Dolmen reached under his desk without looking up and drew out a cheap paper leaflet, folded twice.

Hux stomach dropped. Not specifically because he knew what that was, but for the way Dolmen still didn’t look at him.

Hux already half expected to be greeted by his own face on the paper.

The guy on it had red hair, not light brown, and was clean shaven, but damn be his profile... He was too recognizable and not even the changed topography of the darker brows and eyelashes and the shadow of scruff on his cheeks could hide that from someone as perceptive as his boss.

Under Hux’s loose fitting shirt the blaster pistol rested against his back, a familiar weight, welcome reassurance that he could handle every situation. They’d be gone before any need arose to explain Ti’Lera why her husband was dead.

Now, as Hux’s hands sank to his sides, the leaflet, the damn leaflet fluttering to the floor like one of the leaves Mia loved to hunt, Dolmen looked up, calm as the newborn day.

In the silence of the room his face, name, rank and a ridiculously long list of offences mocked him from the floor. Of course the damn wanted poster landed face up.

He looked at his boss instead.

“You know Bren, I don't know what's going on out there. I holed up on this stupid planet when my wife’s mother put out a hit on me…” Dolmen looked away with a wistful expression, a small smile playing around his mouth that made Hux long for Ren in all the wrong ways. Especially now when Dolmen’s hand rested on his lap in a seemingly relaxed pose and his eyes never quite left Hux out of their field of vision.

“I don't know who this General guy is,” he went on, plaintiveness in his voice, “but I know a friend. Good father to his little girl, hard worker. Very clever. Helped me out of a tight spot.” At this Dolmen looked up with eyes hard as flint. Equals, as much as they could ever be, both with too much knowledge about how the galaxy worked.

“So I thought, Bren, when these guys showed up here and did mighty loud, I thought. Do the right thing, man.”

“The right thing would be to sell me out, Dolm. You are too sentimental.”

That drew a laugh from Dolmen and somewhere deep down Hux had to admire the sheer guts of the man.

“Screw politics, Bren. Your shuttle is stocked. Food. We added to your existing equipment. Taz brought some clothing from when his kids were little. You got a scanner for bugs and trackers?”

Hux nodded, too stunned still to really react and pried his fingers one by one from his gun. That moment had passed while he had hesitated, hindered by sentiment and surprise in a way the General never would have been.

"Great.” If Dolmen noticed, he ignored it and Hux felt a deep, stupid gratefulness bloom in his chest. Not for the chance at escape, it was the consideration for his pride that did him in. Friends probably did that. “Go over the ship. I swear it's clean, but no father in his right mind would take that risk with his kid. Taz is picking up Mia from the school now, Jaya empties your apartment. You'll be off this planet in an hour.”

“When were they here?”

“Three hours ago. I’d guess they’ll be in Waywatertown now, and that’ll take them a while.”

“Stormtroopers?” Hux gulped when his voice cracked. “Led by a captain in chrome armor?”

Dolmen’s head tilted with a curious smile, then he nodded.

“Good.” With a deep breath Hux cracked his neck, shored up his mental walls and straightened. “Here’s what you will do: You will tell her exactly what you know. You will sell me out and tell them where I intended to go… tell her I said something about protocol 5.”

“Protocol 5?”

“Do you trust me, Dolmen?”

“Hell no!” He laughed. “You’re too damn clever for your own good and I need to know what you are playing at.”

Hux lips twitched, rolling his eyes like he had done a dozen times in this office, playing off the other man with the unfamiliar ease of equals.

“It’s a protocol for the acquirement of external information sources. They will one day take over this planet and when that day comes to pass, you want to be on their good side with your Twi’lek wife and children. Or they won’t and the Republic will push them back and when that happens, you will want to have as much information as you can to sell them to establish yourself as a trusted contact.” With a deep breath Hux crossed over to his own desk and pulled out the middle drawer. That had never been the most secret cache, but being that obvious was a layer of secrecy in itself.

“You will tell her exactly where I go and she will mention it positively to her superiors. You are setting yourself up as a major player on Salk and the First Order will want to keep you instead of disrupting the existing structures.”

“And where will you go?” Dolmen crossed his arms and watched as Hux unpinned a datachip case from under the drawer and pocketed it.

“Nal Hutta.” Hux smiled. “You said you had a Resistance contact? I need that.”

“The Resistance is not on Nal… Oh you fucker.”

Outside Taz’ speeder pulled up to the warehouse, unmistakable for the hitch in its second engine where a fan blade had broken.

“Go, check your shuttle. I’ll get it.”

Hux’s smile grew as Dolmen walked behind his desk, shaking his head. “And to think I used you to get rid of Ethan, instead of a planetary take over…”

As promised the shuttle was clean, three boxes stacked orderly in the cargo bay. Someone had draped Mia’s blanket over one of the cots. Taz, likely, because he was a sentimental idiot.

Hux heard Mia chatting with Jaya outside, telling her an exciting story about a toad. To the woman the child sounded normal. She didn’t to Hux and he needed only one look at her walking up the ramp, her arms slung tightly around Ren, the pet wolf. Mia knew. This was her last time with Jaya, with Taz and she would never see her friends again. Still, she walked up the ramp and waved to Jaya with a beautifully put upon smile.

Something in Hux’s chest clenched to painful tightness, pride, he decided, at Mia’s strength, pain at the loss mingled with a vague memory of himself staring out a speeder window for a last glimpse of the house he had been born in.

 

“Why...” Hux croaked when finally Dolmen walked up, hand outstretched in a friendly greeting. This was not self-evident, helping a mass murderer out from under the First Orders scrutiny. It was dangerous for them and they hadn’t even hesitated.

Dolmen smiled and shrugged, clasping Hux’s hand tightly.

“Because everybody here fled from something, Bren.” He pointed behind himself towards the warehouse that looked like so little, though Hux knew that it was only a seed. It would grow, the settlement would grow and if Dolmen pulled it off well, he would take over Waywatertown within a year. “You don’t come out here to start over if you don’t have a good reason. I don't give fuck who you were before, but that man?” He gestured Hux up and down, taking in his simple linen shirt, perpetually stained with oil now and his combat boots, cleaned and polished, the leather perfectly cared for. And he took in Mia, clutching Hux’s hand with despondency, trusting him to stay exactly where he was, at her side. “That's my friend. So get going, before they come back.”

Hux gripped his hand and nodded, once, a crisp salute before he turned and picked up his girl, carried her to the co-pilot seat and set her down with care.

She tried to strap herself, startled from the concentration of too complex buckles as Hux brushed his hand over her hair. Haircut… he’d need to cut her hair again. The way the short strands stuck in every direction now would be cute only until they grew too long and flopped down.

 

No storm today The weather was as pleasant and calm as it had been the day he landed. Every way was open to him, though protocol stated the First Order ship to keep to an equatorial orbit.

He flew poleward once more.

 

“Was it me?” She asked with doubt coloring her voice as they broke through the mesosphere and before them the expanse of the Galaxy opened.

“I don't know.” Hux paused. “I don't think so. They were far too unspecific for a concrete hint. A general idea maybe, pictures of the planet from your memories.”

“He will do it again, won’t he? So I have to not show him, right?”

Hux stared out the viewport, at the frigate that hung in orbit like a snake waiting to strike.

“No.” Hux fingers hammered the Hyperspace coordinates into the dash with far more force than necessary. “We'll go where he can't follow”


	4. Chapter 4

Liajabra station on second approach seemed at once more complicated and more familiar. Where at first it had looked like nothing more than a random collection of buildings, this time, Hux saw the makings of the old Republic relay station underneath layers and layers of building code violations. The strict lines of the prefabricated standard layout left their marks in between the assortment of mechanic shops that ringed the spaceport, a dull jewel in the glittering setting of amusement facilities, utilitarian gray in the sparkling light that sent broken signals into space.

Through the middle, from spaceport to ‘administration’ stretched a strip of surprisingly respectable shops. Hux pondered visiting the merchant but threw the thought when the next followed. They didn't want to leave a trace.

The address Dolmen had sent them to belonged to a low plastcrete building, only one story on the upper level of a secondary street. 

It appeared from the street to be stretched farther into the back, giving the whole arrangement a surprising depth. When Hux stepped up the walkway, though, Mia guided closely at his side, he saw that behind this building the block had developed into a whole different level altogether and Empire knew what lay below. 

Possibly the back areas of the junk shop on the first level, though that seemed excessive. Just as well it might turn out to belong to a twilight shrouded demimonde, hidden from the pale light of the asteroids far away twin suns and the local strongman. It might belong to said strongman. Hux didn’t plan on finding out and neither, it seemed, did Mia. 

 

Dolmen had not only supplied him with a name and address, he had gifted Hux with a personal security estimation, an almost glowing recommendation of a smuggler and criminal at heart and a supporter of the rightful government below.

Hux hadn't bothered to disagree. 

He had excised his loyalty to Snoke in one clean, painful stroke, letting the stumps of a younger man's need to impress burn and wither away. Unlike Hux’s loyalty to his soldiers, it hadn’t survived Ren’s pain and subsequent defection. And it had sure not survived Mia. 

 

Her hand was tiny in his, skin so soft against the callouses of his palm. Walking through the streets, with people and creatures milling around them from every background and half the species of the galaxy, it felt normal. Normal to be the barrier that protected her from kicking legs and pushing bodies. Normal to pick her up when traffic became too dense. Her arms around his neck were the most natural thing, even the fine hairs of Ren, her stupid pet wolf, tickling Hux’s ear as she gripped it tightly in an anxious fist felt right. 

In the middle of a smuggler’s haven with her hazel eyes that saw too much and her little too big ears that heard too much she looked more out of place than ever. But also more at home. 

Only Hux heard her random giggle and only he knew what it meant as he pressed a kiss into her hair and murmured: “Stop reading people’s thoughts.” 

She only giggled harder. 

 

Inside the bar a lone Twi’lek male wiped down the bar top, eyes fixed steadfastly on the holo in the corner. It was always hard to tell with alien species, but he looked too young to have been an experienced pilot, so Hux assumed he wasn’t the target. 

He was her son, a simple question confirmed, and if Hux had been concerned that his face was too recognizable with the Resistance he needn’t have worried. Dolmen’s name opened that door for him. 

The boy offered Mia food for her wait, drink and entertainment with a change of the holochannel. Hux expected her to rebel against being left behind, but she just smiled and pushed her hair back. “I will play with Ren.” 

The wolf in her hand did nothing to deny or corroborate that statement, he continued his plushy existence with undiminished fervor. 

“Are you alright staying with him?” Hux nodded towards the young keeper, though he already knew the answer. It was important to ask, nonetheless, to show her that her opinion was valued as much as her denial should it come. But his kid knew bad people from three light years away, so Hux was not really worried. 

Mia hugged Ren close and nodded, her hand pointing towards a corner table near the door. 

“I’ll be there.”

“Alright.”

 

Kierra Taa was unremarkable for a Twi’lek, her rutian skin washed out by a hard life. “I’ve been doing this for too long,” she told him not even five minutes after they had retreated into her office. 

Hux had expected a more difficult negotiation, but either she was old or Dolmen had done more than just sent Hux here. It didn’t matter. 

Kierra Taa took his story at face value and after a generous donation to the Resistance’s cause - because nothing was for nothing in the galaxy and Hux could respect that before all else - he had what he had come for. 

Walking out of the backroom Hux turned the coordinates over in his mind and turned towards the corner table with a smile. 

A sheet of paper and a motley collection of crayons in various states of existence still lay next to an empty glass and a plate of half-eaten porridge. Mia was not there.

 

“WHERE IS SHE?” 

The boy stumbled out of the door behind the bar, eyes frantic and confusion written in every fiber of his body. 

“I don’t...” He stared at the empty corner table, browless forehead drawn. “She was here five minutes ago. I was just in the storeroom getting beer…”

The door Hux had just exited flew open, Kierra Taa in the frame with a blaster in her hand. Before she could ask a question a rage-howling scream rattled the cheap plastiglass windows and the pitchers behind the bar.

Hux ran.

 

Outside, nothing had changed. The sounds of a myriad of voices still filtered through the smell of fuel, alcohol and biologicals. Above him, the atmosphere barrier shimmered in the low light of the distant suns. Two Ithorians on the street stared up to him as if he was responsible for the scream. He ignored them and ran around the corner towards the backward alleys on this level.

 

He found her with her back pressed against the wall, blood running freely down her chin from a split lip. She had her hands pushed straight out in front of her to hold a grown Zabrak male at bay, a mercenary, with dark skin that bordered on blood red. Hux could identify a broken horn on the left of his skull. He might need that later.

Mia’s stuffed wolf lay discarded several feet away on a pile of trash. 

The officer’s knife whispered from the sheath in Hux’s right boot. 

“Don’t be afraid little one,” the Zabrak’s voice had an unpleasant rasp, a sort of dry click, to it that indicated he had once damaged his voice box. It reminded Hux of Ren’s mask and he did not like that reminder. “But if you bite me again, you will regret it.” The Zabrak chuckled, but it turned into a curse quickly when his grabbing hand slid off a barrier right in front of Mia’s hands. 

Hux switched the grip of his knife.

As with everything he had been exceptional, back at the academy. Trained from the age of five, his skill in hand to hand combat could measure up to most. After he had trained with Kylo Ren, it could measure up to almost everybody. But that was not it. What set him apart from many in the Galaxy was his uninhibited willingness to murder.

A soft touch brushed over his mind and he threw open every pathway for her.

“Don't look at me,” he thought, although her gaze had yet to waver from her attacker.

Mia was too good, too well trained to commit a blatant mistake like that. Not all thanks to him, but at least Hux knew where she learned the trust to let him handle it. In the far corner of his field of vision Ren the stuffed wolf quivered ever so slightly. 

She smiled.

Hux sprang forward.

The knife carved upwards and slipped clean under the Zabrak’s too short body armor to where his kidneys would have been, had he been human. 

Hux did not especially know or care if Zabrak had kidneys, xenobiology was not a part of First Order standard curriculum.

But they had a head and a neck. 

With a brutal grip, Hux grabbed the Zabrak’s shirt and spun him around. The knife in his hand flipped in motion with his hand slashing upwards, fingers closing around the grip in the last moment, just in time to add the bit of momentum to draw it in one clean sweep across the male’s throat. Hux twisted to the right in a swift turn to avoid the spurt of blood. 

A soft push and the would-be abductor tipped forward. 

Another step brought Hux to Mia’s side, the knife still firmly enclosed in his fingers. She didn’t mind, reached only up to him with a soft, pitiful howl and climb into his arms. 

A crowd stood at the mouth of the alley, watching him, watching the still twitching corpse. 

“Anybody else?” 

Even Kierra Taa flinched at the sound of his voice. Hux remembered that voice, the General’s voice. It was reserved for people who displeased him. Today was not a day when he was in a mood to be lenient. 

The Zabrak at his feet lay finally still. Mia’s arms were around his neck, her small body warm and safe on his arm. 

Their audience dispersed. Except Kierra Taa and her son, who stayed behind, weapons at the ready though not pointed at him. 

“Search the Zabrak,” she told the boy, the same moment as Mia hiccuped into Hux’s ear. 

“He took Ren, I had to…” 

“Shhhh,” Hux murmured and spread his hands across her back. It felt far too large as it spanned her small shoulders. She was a little girl that just held a grown Zabrak away using the Force and still managed to keep it low-key enough to maintain secrecy. She dealt with blood and dead bodies with unflinching equanimity. Five years old and if Hux knew Snoke even a little, Mia had killed already. But below that she was just a little girl that hiccuped into Hux’s shoulder with little girl’s arms that clung to his neck and that smeared the blood of her split lip against his shirt, demanding the protection of the dripping knife in his hand

“He stole Ren and I had to go after him.” Mia’s whisper broke on every second word.

“Yes, Birdlet, and look how well that worked out for you.” Hux watched Kierra’s son fleece the still bleeding body with half an eye, his own back turned towards a wall. The other eye stayed firmly on the second entrance to the alleyway, empty as of yet. Every other of his senses had honed in on the living weight on his arm. “Let's leave the rescues to me until you reach my chest, all right?”

“But I am…” she set out and Hux cut her off before the protest took up heat. 

“Still so small that I can pick you up with one hand.” 

Mia had begun shivering in his arms, violent heaves that wracked her slim frame and still she stared at him with her deep eyes and the stubbornness to take on the universe.

“Listen, Mia,” Hux tried again, “we make a deal. I will protect you until you are tall enough to actually reach anything vital with a knife and put enough power behind it to do damage.”

Hux turned her away from the body and towards the garbage pile where her wolf, her mental protector, lay discarded. “Until that day your responsibility is caring for Ren and mine is protecting you both. Alright?”

Something in Mia’s eyes shifted at the sight of the wolf, her one true objective. She licked fresh blood from her lip, reached out her hand and before Hux could stop her the stuffed pet rose and flew into her hand. 

Kierra behind them gasped. “Force, she is…” 

The knife in Hux's hand clattered to the ground. It was the sight of Hux’s blaster trained on her face that stopped Kierra. “Unremarkable,” he said. 

The child in his arm shoved the pet between their bodies, protecting it from the world with both their lives. 

Kierra’s eyes fell on Mia, then on Hux and she dipped her head. 

“A sweet little girl but otherwise unremarkable.”

Hux nodded. “We need to get to the shuttle. If someone found us here, they will….”

“No,” with a glance behind her shoulder Kierra sheathed her blaster. “If someone is after you, they’ll be waiting for you in the port.”

 

Her son got up, wiping blood off his hands and shook his head. 

“Nothing out of the ordinary. Blaster, creds and a datachip.” He turned to Hux. “My mother is right. We can get you to the port, but not like this. We have… friends… who can watch your ship for now. But if you walk there in broad daylight, they will be on you before the next crossing.” 

“It’s all right,” Mia whispered at Hux’s throat, her hair tickling his chin. “He isn’t lying.”

“Bren,” Kierra said, unflinching, as Hux holstered his own blaster and crouched to retrieve the knife, “we will not deliver a child to whatever is after you. You need to trust someone to get off this rock. And she is…”

Their eyes met, granite stares for both of them. Kierra Taa had been a pilot once, a soldier. Her son stood a few feet away with his hands bloodied by Hux’s kill. A flick of Hux’s wrist and the knife could lodge itself seamlessly in his throat. 

Against him, Mia tensed. 

“Alright,” Hux said on a long exhale. “All right, but if you betray us…”

Kierra jerked her head sharply towards her pub. 

“What about the body?” Hux was not a pious man, but leaving proof of his kills did not sit lightly with him.

“He abducted a child from my territory,” Kierra snarled. “Leave him. As a warning. As a reminder. The low lives will take care of him.”

With these words she stalked out of the alley, her son close on her heels, leaving Hux behind to readjust his opinion of her. 

 

Before Ljiabra had become a relay station, long before anybody turned that relay station into a free spaceport, it had been a mining colony. The Republic had prospected for Kammris but found after a short yet intense campaign there wasn’t enough mineral to justify the added cost of location and security 

Kierra’s son told them all this while he dragged boxes of supplies aside to reveal a low door that led to what once had been a back staircase. Before the second level had closed off the alley below and turned it into a secret tunnel. They had discovered it by accident, wondering why no sound carried over from the brothel behind them. Hux didn't need to hear Mia whisper ‘the force wanted them to’ to know what she was thinking. 

“You’re like your father,” he responded and was rewarded with a giggle. 

She had recovered well, once they had been in the safety of the pub and Hux had taken care of the cut in her lip and her bruises. What a little Bacta healing cream couldn’t mend, a few pieces of chocolate did. Kierra’s son had bribed her with a sweet drink he had sworn came from his homeworld Ryloth. Mia had been ecstatic, telling him all about how her friends’ mother had made that for them when she slept over and there had been a storm. 

The young Twi’lek had listened patiently while scanning the datachip he had taken from the Zabrak. 

Now Mia climbed down the rundown stairs by Hux’s hand, putting greatest care into each of her steps, neither deterred by the dust dry air nor the dirt and surely not by the darkness. Once she stood at the bottom of the stairwell, her eyes half lidded in the dancing light of his lamp, she slowly stretched her fingers at her side where they didn’t hold her wolf, her lips parted softly on a long slow exhale. Her breath hitched and something in the dark scurried away. 

Hux’s warning glance was mirrored with a soft smile, not without pride. 

“Nobody here,” she whispered and took his hand.

Behind them, Kierra’s son jumped the last two steps with a dull thud. 

“Hey,” Hux called softly, “What’s your name?”

“Tal’Kairn Taa,” he answered with a thin-lipped smile and clipped the lamp onto his belt. “Why?” 

“Nothing,” Hux felt the blaster at his side and mapped what little he could see in the light circle. “I just thought I never learned it. Bren Antilles, nice to meet you.” 

He watched the silhouette of the boy as he turned away with a negligent nod, almost remembering something Ren had once said in his uncannily pompous manner. They had been talking about the Force, about every living being’s connection. Ren had tried to explain to him how Force sensitivity was not a switch, but a scale and...

With a shake of his head, he set out to follow the Twi’lek. 

  
  


The stairwell to the old tunnels lay behind yet another heavy blast door, reinforced with Wroshyr wood on the outside that gave it a deceptively vulnerable look. How someone had gotten their hands on Wroshyr wood on Ljiabra was yet another story. 

The tunnels were high enough for a grown man to walk, solid stone and dry. They looked perfectly deserted, if not for a scratch here and there that was not yet properly oxidized.

 

Tal’Kairn took point with Mia between them. They didn’t talk for the whole of the twenty minutes they wandered through the abandoned maze. There was no need for words, only the spaceport’s softly glowing homing beacon on Tal’Kairn’s datapad and the lonely glow of the lamp, their voices an intrusion on the helpless reverence of silence, so close to the asteroid’s heart. It seemed not even the roar of spaceships taking off could shake the rock at the port’s base into resonance. 

Maybe it was that, the heaviness of the claustrophobic tunnels, the intimacy between the abandoned stone. Or maybe it was a projection from Mia that she herself was unable to consciously perceive, too young still for that kind of paranoia. Maybe it was the Force as Ren liked to say. _ Your instincts are good. Trust them! _ The blaster was in Hux’s hand, thumbed to stun before Mia’s warning scream had reached his brain. 

Tal’Kairn had not yet fully turned when the blast hit him and threw him back, his own blaster flying into the darkness where it landed with a low thud. And again, silence. 

Mia had dropped flat to the floor, a dark lump in the irregular circle of Tal’Kairn’s lamp.

“Mia?” Hux’s voice felt too loud. 

She seemed to be of the same opinion since she whispered her response. “He knew.”

Hux walked around her, staying in the Twi’lek’s back. 

“Knew what?” 

The boy was heavier than he looked and it took a considerable amount of strength to roll him over. If one of his lekku got caught under his body, it was no problem of Hux’s. He just grabbed the lamp from Tal’Kairn’s belt, clipped it to his own, took the datapad and stepped back. The blaster was set back to kill, even the stun setting a concession more to the fact that Dolmen was their …friend than anything else. 

“Knew what, Mia?” He repeated to her shocked faced, fixed on the thin trail of blood that ran from Tal’Kairn’s nose. 

“Who you are.” 

There was no reason not to shoot him. There was no reason to shoot. Nothing but personal preference. The boy dead meant no witnesses. The boy alive meant not having his mother on their heels. With a sigh, Hux moved closer again and patted the Twi’lek down until he found the datachip they had fleeced off the headhunter earlier. 

If Tal’Kairn knew his identity then his mother did as well and Hux had lost one of his biggest advantages to a stupid, shortsighted mistake on his part. 

“He thinks you’ll hurt me.” Mia pushed up from the floor when Hux stood and brushed down her front, spreading a fine dust cloud all around them. “He thinks you’re bad.”

Hux scoffed and reached out his left hand for her. “Well, he’s not wrong there.” 

“Will you hurt him?”

“Do you want me to hurt him, Mia?”

“It is tactically sound to not leave anyone alive, sir.” 

Hux stopped to stare. “That is what Miaro Syrum Ren says,” he scolded gently. “What does Mia say?”

“Mia likes him.” His girl hang her head, watching Hux carefully from behind tousled bangs. “Can we not kill him?” 

“To many complex problems, there is always an easy answer, Mia, that is completely wrong.” 

She nodded, lack of understanding written boldly over her features.

“I can kill him,” Hux elaborated with care, “and he won’t be able to tell anyone our secret. But: I suspect Kierra knows, too. We have no time to go back and even if, she is with the Resistance and doesn’t want to sell the information so she likely already spread it. She is his mother and I know for a fact she would hunt us to ends of the Galaxy if I kill him.”

“My mother wouldn’t,” Mia murmured and Hux snorted darkly. 

“Yeah, but I would… So, no killing the little idiot. Let him walk back alone in the darkness or wait until his people come for him. We’ll be gone by then.”

“Thank you.” Her hand in his was small and warm and Hux, not for the first time, wondered how hard someone must long for gentleness to be that gentle with the Galaxy’s power freely at her fingertips. 

 

***

 

Everything they needed was waiting at the exit to the tunnels, just as Kierra had promised. A good sign that her son had only been rash in the age old tradition of young men at the cusp of adulthood. Not that it mattered. Tal’Kairn lived.

There would be neither reward nor punishment for that decision, except the gentle reminder of Hux to himself that not everything needed to be determined by cold pragmatism. Not anymore. 

The fuel cell box provided barely enough space for Mia, curled up and twisted into a little ball, as she looked up at him with her luminous eyes, a knife and Ren safely cradled against her chest. Her hiding place vanished among the other 7 boxes on the hovercart. A loan from the depot of one of Kierra's and incidentally Dolmen’s acquaintances. 

The plan was not ideal, but it was good enough. Walk up to the ship in broad daylight; an unremarkable supply run as they happened in a spaceport a hundred times a day. If they were looking for a little girl, they wouldn't remark on a run down dock worker.

“What are we going to do?” Hux crouched down and brought himself to her eye level.

“You will bring the cart on board. I will stay very still and not talk.”

“What is the code word?”

“Skywalker.”

“If someone opens the box without saying it?”

“I stab their eyes or slash their throat. Not stab it.”

“Yes. Very Good.” Hux brushed back a wayward strand of hair from her eyes. “And why are we doing this?”

Mia's face scrunched unhappily. “Because we're clever and do not rush headlong into danger when we have a few minutes to think about our options. And we trust our partners to do their job.”

“I promise I keep you safe and I will be right beside your box the whole time. Alright?”

“Alright,” The cover for the box weighed heavy in his hand while she tried to better fit the adult’s oxygen mask over her face. All less than ideal and had they had more time, Hux would have tried to improve on several points, but there was no saying how soon Tal’Kairn might wake. They had this one chance and as Phasma always said: live in the situation.

“Ready, soldier?” Hux asked when Mia had finally found a comfortable position for the mask, his smile deepening when she raised her thumb. 

“Ready, General.”

 

They walked up to the shuttle, Mia’s mind an insistent pressure at the back of his, cutting in mute fear. So much so that Hux barely needed to play up the unsteady gait of a drunk. He wore a cheap wrap slung loosely around his head and his shaggy beard darkened with soot, an uncomfortable reminder how much he longed to shave again just once.

He would, he decided. Before this was over, he would return to himself. Not in character. That creature of blind obedience and unquestioning command execution was dead and had been for quite a while. But it would be nice, Hux decided, as he pushed the cart up the ramp to landing bay 9c, to see his own face again. The one Ren had so many times professed to love. It would be nice, he thought and hefted up the one box that mattered, to return to the only thing from his life he actually wanted to keep. The memory of Kylo Ren and how stupid and sappy he sometimes was, how heroic when he didn’t waste his time pandering to Snoke’s every whim, how clever if he allowed himself to think. 

 

Hux dropped the box in safe distance from the open landing ramp and tapped it twice before he opened the secured lid. “Time to wake up, little Skywalker.”

Her relief rolled over him as her child’s hand touched his even before the lid gave away her face.

“Ship clear?” He asked and lifted her out of the cramped space, holding on until her legs stopped wobbling.

Mia closed her eyes and took a deep breath, curling an arm around Hux’s leg as she was wont to do whenever she didn’t want to let him go. In Hux’s mind, the seconds ticked by until the urge to tell her to hurry became almost unbearable.

“Yes, sir,” she finally whispered. “They’re outside. Kierra is coming. She is very scared.”

Hux bet she was. 

With a smile, he brushed over Mia’s hair and pushed her gently toward her bunk. 

“Buckle in, Birdlet. That’s gonna get rough.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled as Hux already ran towards the cockpit, crouched below window height, “Again.” She sounded so much like her father in that one moment, that Hux crept into the pilot’s seat laughing.

He was laughing still when he thumbed the exit ramp switch, the shields and the starting sequence, sitting up only in the last second to pull back the controls.

He didn’t want her here, with blaster shots sparking over the insufficient atmospheric shields, flashing across the frontal viewport. Not all of the shots outside were aimed at them. 

Hux saw Kierra taking out lowlives and at least one Mandalorian, while those with her tried to keep the shuttle on the ground. If the shields broke the cockpit would be scorched earth while the loading bay was still protected and with it the bunk area. Kierra knew that. She would never have her people open fire if it endangered Mia, no matter how furious she might be. How much she knew about Mia’s heritage was an unknown, but Hux didn’t peg her as the person to kill a little child just to prove a point.

 

Under Hux’s hand, the yoke shuddered with the violence leveled at his ship. Three months ago they might have brought him down like that, now he just yanked it back and rerouted energy to the starboard thrusters.

The shuttle was First Order built, predictable within its set parameters and as reliable as they came. It was not made for split second decision. Not for creative piloting. Mia’s scream pierced the sound of loose parts rattling, tumbling every which way, the deep rumble of engines strained to their limit and the pressure on Hux’s ears as they roared up and past the skyward bay gates with no hair’s breadth to spare and debris peppering those below. 

“Hux!” Kierra's scream echoed hollowly from the general line cockpit speakers. Once Hux would not have cared, now he thumbed her in, while he steered his fidgety shuttle through the rapidly thinning atmosphere, fighting the steering yoke to follow the pre-allocated flightpath for his bay to a T.

“Your son really shouldn't have tried to take my daughter, Kierra Taa.” Calm. Respectful in a way she still deserved. It had been her who had helped him come up with this crazy, successful plan and pull it off; clothes she had provided that he still wore.

“She is not your daughter. Whoever you stole her from.... Murderer!”

“One out of three right, not bad….” Hux’s murmur was too low to be picked up by the dashboard microphone, even as he bent forward to type in the parameters for a hyperspace jump. Fixed coordinates, just to get away.

He was not quite done before the silence on the other end of the connection broke and Kierra Taa did the probably bravest thing Hux could imagine or maybe the one thing every parent would do in this situation.

“Where is my son?” she asked. Her voice spoke of her dread, the expectation of the worst.

As if she had known - and Mia always knew - his girl appeared in the cockpit door, her wolf pressed against her chest. Hux pointed to the co-pilot’s seat without looking.

“You are not to decide about Mia's parentage, Kierra Taa.” 

 

Not quite a year ago Hux had sat with Kylo Ren, and watched the Galaxy move by the viewport window in Hux’s office, after Starkiller, after Andras, after everything, really, and before the rest. 

“Han Solo,” Ren said on that evening, speaking the unspeakable, “Was Ben Solo’s father. Not Kylo Ren’s.” 

Hux looked up in surprise. “And who is Kylo Ren’s father?” He asked, but he already knew the answer. 

“Snoke gave me my name. I didn’t choose it.” 

“But you chose to go by it, Ren.” At this Ren turned and rested his head on Hux’s naked thigh, arm slung around his middle in a true feat of contortionism. Instead of an answer, he took his time to kiss with unexpected gentleness a few bitemarks on Hux’s skin, settling only slowly into his thoughts. 

“I had nothing else left. When I killed the other students for Snoke I did something unforgivable. Something that made them hate me. Cut off my way back. I thought that was what I wanted when I was fifteen. ”

“But Han Solo came for you.”

“For him, Ben never died,” Kylo whispered. “I never thought he’d care. Snoke showed me what I thought was the truth of their disdain for me.” 

Hux set his datapad aside and started to card his fingers through the knight’s hair, watching that too expressive face for signs of a truth nobody in the Order knew.

“How long has this been going? You and Snoke?”

“I….” Ren frowned. “Always. I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t there in my thoughts, talking to me. Like a third parent. A better father. The one that showed me all the stuff that my other parents didn’t want me to know.” He turned with a huff onto his back and looked up at Hux. “At first, I thought he was my grandfather. I always automatically assumed that meant he was right.” The smile faltered. “What if he wasn’t? I know he lied. What does that make me and my whole existence?”

The silence stretched until Hux sat up, one hand rested comfortably on Ren’s chest, the other still tangled deeply in his hair. 

“He raised me, Hux. He named me.” 

“I feel like I’m going to regret saying this, Ren, but so did Han Solo and Leia Organa.”

“I’d never thought you would come this close to saying something treasonous, Hux.”

“Well, I always assumed my father was right,too.” Before Ren could ask what Hux meant by that, Hux had already sealed his lips with a kiss.

  
  


Under Hux’s fingers, the engines hummed, gathering power for the jump. He waited until Mia had wriggled into the harness that he never really bothered to release anymore. 

Hux waited until she gave him the thumbs up.

“Today is your lucky day, Kierra. Mia happens to like Tal’Kairn. Pray that nothing in those tunnels was hungry.” Somewhere too far away a small freighter sheared into their direction on an interception path. Too slow.

Through the com, hectic activity sounded, people yelling, running. 

“Good luck,” Hux said and meant it, before the stars around them morphed into streaks.


	5. Chapter 5

“Careful, Lady Ren.”

Hux’s use of her title threw Mia into a giggle fit. The bowl she kept suspended between the galley table and the food processor wobbled dangerously. 

Hux didn’t much care for the mush with the colorful bits Ti’lara had claimed were fruit and that he had never seen anywhere else. He himself couldn’t eat it, his physiology still too accustomed to the nutritious but bland diet the First Order preferred. Mia loved everything sweet, just like her father, and it seemed her young body had no trouble metabolizing anything. Hux did care for the clean up, though, should it drop, more even for Mia’s subsequent tears. 

“Slow down, Mia. You’re doing good.” Although Hux knew nothing about the Force beyond Ren’s overboarding mysticism, he found he knew enough about little girls and how to encourage them. It was not that different from his officers, albeit with more tears and less backstabbing.

And more open joy. 

She plucked the bowl from the air and dropped it on the table with a triumphant “ha!” her eyes alight, her smile only hampered by the small cut that marred her lower lip. “Did you see?” she exclaimed and Hux couldn’t have stopped the smile spreading across his face if his life had depended on it. 

“I saw.” 

“I put the milk in  _ and _ I floated it with the Force.” Mia rarely bothered with spoons, she just lifted the bowl and drank. “I’m gonna be a big Jedi…”

“Mia!” Hux cut her off. “Swallow first.” 

She did. Licked her lips and set out right away. “...Jedi Knight!” There were days when it was painfully easy to see Ren in her eyes, her exuberance, and careless emotionality. Not in violence, Mia was not a violent person, but in passion. In her quirky little fits of creativity and mischief.

“Yes, you’re gonna be a big Jedi. But now, big Jedi Knight in training, we eat. And then?”

“We sleep.” She slurred, drinking again.

“Right, because we have a busy few days ahead.”

“We gonna meet my father!” 

Hux took another bite of his nutrition bar and watched her face light up with joy, with the anticipation of an adventure. Someone would suffer down the line because Hux couldn’t be bothered to not let her eat sweet food for dinner, but that was a mess he’d leave for Ren to clean up. 

 

***

 

He fell asleep with the slow, warm realization of safety settling like lead into his bones. The ship’s docking thrusters clicked gently as they readjusted the hooks that kept them plastered to the jagged surface of a midlevel asteroid in the Clfw’ou field.

“Move gently, Hux.” He had imagined Ren’s voice. A leftover from the only time he had ever had the chance to watch him fly. “Let your ship do the work. The ship knows what’s up, even if you don’t.”

“Move there,” Mia had interjected and pointed to the left right before a big chunk drifted past the viewport. Among all the things the Academy had not prepared Hux for, stopovers in asteroid fields were the grossest negligence. There were no places safer when a man was on the run. That incidentally perhaps was the exact reason why no one in the First Order taught it. 

Something in Hux would forever shrink away from thoughts like this, even while another part of him cackled. 

 

He woke with the knowledge of a dread stare leveled at him, a silent command to pay attention. 

Her shadow loomed next to the bed, a figure build of darkness and terrified eyes. 

“What's wrong?” he asked, not daring to move lest she’d shy.

“Bad dream, sir.” Hux had heard that same tone of voice a dozen times already, been woken from his desk, the kitchen table and the silent watch in the pilot’s chair. “What if they don’t like me?” 

Tears shimmered in her eyes, speaking loudly over her usual cheerful demeanor. “Snoke says, I am bad. I am dark side. What if they know?” 

With a sigh Hux lifted his blanket and the great coat that had never left this shuttle and let her curl up against him, her head tucked securely under his chin.   
With another sigh, Hux reached for his datapad and dropped a kiss onto her hair. 

Miaro Syrum Ren was the most fidgety sleeper in the galaxy and he’d need his senses on him to avoid her kicks, her pointy little elbows or her enthusiastic skull. Hux couldn’t imagine not being woken by her anymore. 

 

The datapad weighed heavily in his hands as if knowledge gave it mass. As if a hundred ship plans, hyperlane routes and personality profiles lent it weight. Or perhaps that was just his guilt. There were ways to disable a Star Destroyer without blowing it to pieces. Few besides Hux knew them. None of them cared enough about those on board to share them. 

Mitaka in all his nervous dependability. Terrified to his last bone yet still doing his duty. Unamo, brilliant Unamo who saw everything in the universe as a set of interlocking systems influencing each other. And Phasma, who shamed him with her conscientiousness towards her Stormtroopers, who’d gladly sacrificed a stuffed up bureaucrat, no matter their importance, for one of her own. 

It had never been about the First Order. In the grand scheme of things, his people were not more wrong that the Republic. They all had faults and to all of them, the disenfranchised fell through cracks it should have been their duty to close. 

The Stormtroopers were not victims; they were housed and fed and given a purpose where they, on their home planets, might have been given nothing but a slow death. 

But whereas the Republic had been led by a bunch of brain-addled pacifists, sheep that were happily led by a few wolves, the First Order was led blindly by a malevolent spirit of chaos and destruction that intentionally fed the cruelty of people like Brendol Hux Sr. 

The Stormtroopers were not victims, Hux thought, and only then remembered that he had cut off his own son to spare him that fate. 

With a sigh, he typed down the coordinates of the two biggest training facilities. Vanua and Kirk-jin, where they housed the children. 

None of that, though, not the ship specifications, not the hyperlane routes, shipyards or names of the most important players, were of any use if Snoke was not taken care off. 

Mia sniffled softly against his chest, fist curled into his shirt with single-minded intensity. 

They might have had a chance, if not for Snoke. 

He left her an hour later, deeply entrenched in sleep, burrowed into his blanket and great coat, his warmth and scent, and trotted into the refresher to shave and bring his hair into order. 

There were still things he needed to do.

 

The cockpit felt as empty as his mind with her retreated from both into deep sleep.

At first, her presence perpetually lurking at the corners of his mind felt uncannily like Ren and Hux wondered if that wasn't Snoke's influence, the way he had shaped them both.

In the silence of everything that lay behind and the vast stretched unknown in front, Hux permitted himself a small swig from the hip flask he had filled with Dolmen’s brandy on Salk.

The second swig, a toast into the wide expanse of the universe went to, unbelievably, Han Solo.

 

_ "He looked at me and said 'just come home.' as if it were that easy.  As if, no matter what I had done and no matter what I did, no matter who I was, he would first and foremost love me. I always believed they hated me because I had so much dark in me.  I can't remember a time when Snoke did not remind me of it at every turn. That I was never good enough for them, they would never accept me because of who I was. And here stood my father and loved me... I knew I needed to kill him and I couldn't. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than go home. Forgive him, accept his forgiveness, see my mother again and just... I wanted a chance to be that person I had never had a chance to be. _

_ So he pushed the button. He looked at me and he loved me and pushed the button. And I finally understood. He was a bit of a shitty father and an absolutely desolate mentor, but he loved me and no matter what, that never changed. _

 

_ Mine would never love me, no matter what I did, and kriffing hell I tried, Hux had thought and watched with Kylo Ren as the stars streamed past the scenic window in his office.  _

 

Hux hadn't understood then. 

The second swig slid down his throat with the same silken burn as the first and he thought that perhaps he did now. There was no sense to good or bad, no sense to love, nothing to be gained or earned, to be deserved. Love, like fate, was delivered arbitrarily.

He had once deserved love and gotten pain and torture instead. Now, nobody deserved love less than him and the universe delivered it at his door as soon as he had murdered a few billion, most of whom had done nothing wrong. The universe didn't care.

But if that was true and it didn't matter how sullied his soul had become then it truly didn't matter going forward. Then he was free, once and for all, to decide his fate.

The third swig turned into a salute.

_ I understand _ , he told Han Solo, sending his thoughts out into the Force. _ I know _ .

 

The holo-recorder on his datapad was good enough, though nothing could be good enough for this.

 

“Mia,” He paused. 

Outside chunks of rock floated past in peaceful dance. A moving, three-dimensional line of defense and for once they were unreachable and safe. It was all he could give her, a few hours respite hidden away in an asteroid field. As if that was worth being his legacy in her life. 

“Mia,” he started again. “Remember what Snoke does?” 

Hux swallowed heavily and closed his eyes for a second. “He lies. He lied to me. He lied to your father.” Tears prickled at the back of his eyelids as he wrangled his thoughts into some semblance of order. This was not something to be solved with lists and sorting. He was not very good with feelings, never had been, but if nothing else, he at least had to try. 

“You are not dark side. If it comes from Snoke, you can just assume that it is a lie to hurt you. But even if, no matter what you have done or what you are going to do, I will always be on your side. No matter what, little bird. No matter what you do to survive, you'll do what you have to and I will still love you. Alright? I will stand with you and I will never judge you. And neither will your father.” 

Maybe she was too young to understand yet, but there would come a point at which she needed to hear this and nobody who had not seen how both she and Ren had been torn into directions that were contrary to their own selves could ever understand the strain they were under. 

“As for the others?” Hux shrugged. “I don’t think they will care.“

He didn’t know, of course, but faced with Snoke’s fearmongering and scheming and his attempts to mold the little girl into something he might use later, Hux was not above assumptions. Maybe they wouldn’t care about anything but her power. Maybe they would fear her as they had Ren. But all that was in the future. Now, it was Hux and all the weapons and armor he could give her. 

“They, your grandmother, first of all, will care about you and not how much light you can wield, because Mia? That is not set in stone. Who you will be is not set in stone. And if you are born dark, you can become light. And the other way round. Or something in the middle. Like Anakin, when he saved Luke.

It is your decision and I know you’ll make the one that is right for you. And no matter what this decision is, I will still love you. Don’t let anyone ever tell you differently.”

The prickling in his eyes got more insistent by the second, a burning desperation born from the need to protect her and the knowledge that he couldn’t. In the end, he just turned the recording off. 

The silence stretched, broken only by the soft clicks of the dockers and an occasional sniffle, the sound of liquid sloshing against the metal of a flask and a sleeve brushing over skin. 

 

Mia was still asleep when Hux gently guided the ship out of its secure position, making use of a fortunate gravitational shift that cleared the path ahead. She’d sleep for a few hours more, exhausted by the events of the last few days. When she awoke it would hopefully be to safety. 

 

The coordinates Kierra had given him should be good for now. Not  _ the _ Resistance outpost, but close enough. Close enough. 

With a sigh he leaned back, the datapad propped against the shuttle’s dash and, while the shuttle raced unerringly toward their destination, he talked. 

 

“Ren. Or maybe I should rather call you Ben, by the name your parents chose for you.” Hux snorted. “See? I haven’t forgotten. I have renamed someone, too, you know? They named her Miaro Syrum Ren, but now she’s mostly just Mia. Antilles, in case you were curious. My sincerest compliments to your mother. 

To feed your further curiosity: yes, it’s true. And if you don’t know how, then it will have to remain a mystery. Despite my sincerest efforts, Lady Selaii did not divulge any bedtime stories, although she was very smug about all of it. I shot her between the eyes.” Hux laughed. 

“Look at me, Ren, killing people because they gloated how they got you and because they put bruises on a child. How far we have come. How endless the universe before us. Not for me, but for you. For her and Andras.”

Hux breathed deeply, a few choking gulps and an angry swipe across his eyes. “Sometimes…,” he started and gulped once more. “Sometimes, I thought of him as ours. And Mia… Kriff, Ren. Congratulations on one marvelous little girl. A little murderous, maybe, but what do you expect of someone who grew up around the Knights’ tail? 

Buy her a pet, she desperately wants one. She loves animals and maybe it’ll help to give her some of that perspective she lacks. 

And kill Snoke. That’s the one thing nobody else can do for her. Kill him! He badgers her constantly in her sleep, and you’ll know about that better than anyone else. Don’t trust her assurances that all is well. She’ll lie to hide how ‘difficult’ she is and Snoke keeps enforcing that. I guess you know about that too, don’t you? It took me a while to figure that out.  

He’s playing the exact same game again. So kill him already.” Hux allowed himself to look away from the camera for a moment, to enjoy the thought that Ren would see this, hear his words and hopefully take them to heart. That Hux was shaping a future for Mia where she might be safe. 

“Two more things, Ren, and welcome to parenthood: 

Never let her sleep in bunk beds, she tends to fall out. 

Keep her away from knives, not because she’ll hurt herself - she won’t - but people tend to react badly to little girls who can gut them and she doesn’t need more of that. 

And don’t feed her chocolate all the time. She is a greedy little monster that will take you by surprise with her big, beautiful eyes and before you know it, she has extorted candy from you. I’ll leave it to you to break her from that habit. This is a battle I won’t need to fight. I doubt sincerely that I’ll make it five steps from this shuttle.” 

Beyond the viewport still showed the magnificent landscape of hyperspace, a promise that Hux could escape, could just go and never face the Republic. 

“Not undeserved, I might add. No matter how you twist it, I can’t demand their restraint. And I won’t.

Anyways. This capsule holds a datachip with all of the information I could compile on short notice. Travel routes, leaders, research projects, building plans for several Star Destroyer models and ways to disable them without killing everybody on board. Secret locations. 

Give the General my regards. They’ll need this. They and this chaos-drenched conglomerate called a Republic that they’ll surely attempt to raise again.  They can use a healthy dose of pragmatism. We could have used a little more heart.” As if the thought occurred to him only then Hux paused and looked over his shoulder but in the depth of the shuttle, everything remained silent. 

“In the end, it matters not. What’s done is done.” 

It was not hard to imagine Ren, the pale, mismatched planes of his face mirroring rapt attention, hanging on every word Hux spoke as once battalions of Stormtroopers had. An audience so much more worthy than the faded interest of self-serving officers. If only. Hux knew well enough that Ren might have moved on, golden boy of the Resistance once more, in his rightful place. Hux smiled with the knowledge that he would never find out. 

A glance aside, he lost himself for a moment in the endless depth outside, the impossible movement, the knowledge that he came close. 

“I had that, you know? A heart. I knew that, Ren. And I missed it sorely when it was gone.” His smile did not barre the tears collecting in his eyes. “I’ll miss it always. But at least I had it. So…Goodbye, Ben Solo. May the Force be with you, or whatever else embarrassingly maudlin adage you prefer these days.” 

This time, after he switched off the recording there were no tears, no prudently wiping his eyes. He smiled. He pulled back his shoulders and smiled.

Mia was still fast asleep when he gently slung a data capsule around her fragile wrist, tied it down, not too tight, gently, to make it easily found and hard to lose. 

He brushed back her hair, the tousled strands just long enough again to gently wave. 

Her nose scrunched as he kissed her cheek. 

 

***

 

Cygna 4 was a moon of mediocre size and extremely mediocre weather, tidally bound to its planet and inhabitable only on strips along the outward facing northern and southern hemispheres. 

The planet should have been an inhabitable world, and it once had been, before an unspeakable catastrophe had contaminated ninety percent of its surface with chemicals and radiation. No recordings had survived of that cataclysm, only a planet covered in poisonous, distorted images of flora and fauna that had adapted into deadliness. 

The rest of the Cygna system was unremarkable, and to be honest the Resistance could hardly have chosen a better advanced scout post. Off the beaten path, but close enough to the Neutral Zone to have a finger on the pulse of any suspicious activities. Interestingly enough the polar opposites of intense equatorial heat and icy permanent night created not a stormy wasteland in between, but a fairly stable flight corridor. Overall, it likely was a slow posting. Nobody paid Cygna much heed and traffic was basically non-existent. A few mines prospecting for precious stones, according to the database summaries on his datapad. 

With a scoff, Hux set out to make their days much more interesting. He opened a com channel. 

“My name is General Brendol Hux II, formerly of the First Order. I have a little child on board and request protection for her. Tell General Organa I have her granddaughter.”

  
  


***

 

Four people stood on the decrepit runway, swathed in the hazy veil of dusky sunlight broken on blood-red dust. At the front loomed a tall Koorivar in clothing that looked like high-fashion on any of the myriad low-life hangouts in the galaxy combined with a washed out cowl wrapped around his head and neck. As Hux gently set down the shuttle, dust swirled up and around the male’s military boots. Sloppy. 

Behind him stood a man, a woman and a Sullustan armed with blaster rifles, framed by a background of a partially underground mining complex; low buildings able to weather most storms and no different from a dozen other operations, they grouped around a small square of cracked plastcrete, every millimeter tinted red. 

“I am alright with dying,” whispered his rational mind as he listened the shuttle work itself through the shutdown sequence, his eyes fixed firmly on the would be shooting squad outside. 

‘No, you’re not,’ answered his heart out of the deepest shadows, hidden behind secret doors and in cupboards were little boys went when they needed to cry, protected by wire fence and denial like a rare animal that dared only come out when Kylo Ren cut a clear path. 

“But I should be,” Hux whispered, as the engines shuddered once and then fell silent.

‘Who said that?’ This voice sounded so distinctly like Ren that Hux cast a glance over his shoulder in irrational hope. 

His father had said that. An imperial officer doesn’t show fear. He does what needs to be done, undeterred by emotional weakness. 

“Well,” Hux snorted and pushed himself out of the pilot’s chair. “He’s dead.”

‘Then why not allow your own dreams?’

“That is a matter of practicality, really.”

Mia slept peacefully, her feet hanging over the side of the bunk along with Ren who precariously dangled above the floor held by a small hand. Poor pet. He’d be loved to pieces in no time. But his namesake should be able to take some of that strain off. 

He would need to. He would. Had he not been absolutely sure in that knowledge Hux would never have walked down the landing ramp, hands held loosely by his side, for once a true amalgam of who he was. Not quite Brendol Hux II., not quite Bren Antilles. A man who never had had a chance to come to life, but who might have been an okay guy. Perhaps. 

With an effort of will, Hux uncurled his fingers and came to a stop in front of the Koorivar, braving the gusting wind and the sandpaper dust with his head held high. 

“It really is you,” the Koorivar said, his expression unreadable. 

“It really isn’t, but you wouldn’t understand.” 

“Where is the child?” 

“Asleep and she should re-” 

Hux wouldn’t attack a man embroiled in quasi-official negotiations. Salk and Ljiabra should have taught him better, yet here he was, falling without a sound when the butt of a rifle slammed into his side.


	6. Chapter 6

Unexpectedly, he woke. Resurfaced without his own doing to the child-sung wailing of a eulogy. Though 'woke' was too strong a word, too close to awake. As if he might get up and go about on his day, eat a bowl of nutrition mix, walk out his door and take command of his ship. No care in the world but the pleasure of her being his and the assurance of a purpose. The Supreme Leader had bestowed a special order on them, a double-edged sword; his own apprentice. Whose reputation was horrible, granted, but there had yet to be a man born capable of withstanding the will of General (not Commander) Hux. With the knowledge that there still was time, he fell back asleep.

 

The explosion rocked the ground he was lying on, peppered glowing hot sparks on everything and everybody, killing the frenzy of the kicks and hits with the efficiency of a bucket load of cold water.

The bloody rivulets on Hux’s arms framed the shuttle’s entrance like the famously dramatic rendition of - fittingly - a Jedi padawan’s trials that hung in the former Imperial museum on Coruscant. Like a vengeful, royal spirit, stood the diminutive form of Mia, barefoot and clad in her dark robe, on top of the landing ramp, her hair tousled, her face set as she whispered in the silence that followed the explosion. “Da?”

Dust swirled around her tiny form, like an invisible cape, as she stepped carefully down the ramp, her eyes set on the people around him. Ren’s daughter, alright. That dramatic entrance, that regality, was all him.

Hux croaked a warning to her, a command to drive her back, away from him and them and back to the safety of the shuttle. The words lacked the strength to make it even to his tormentor’s ears.

"Stop,” she commanded in her girlish voice, a stuffed wolf pressed to her chest. “or I will make you. And you cannot hurt me or Da will kill you. And if you are bad I will show you the power of the Force.” Hux saw the terror in her too-wide eyes, saw too, how well she hid it, how she turned Snoke’s figures of speech to her advantage. “Da says I am not allowed to hurt people but he can't talk right now. Alright?"

She smiled. The man who had just shattered Hux's leg flinched.

“Listen, girl…,” the sole woman in the group spoke.

“No!” Mia looked at her and behind her rose a part of what Hux assumed had been a generator before she blew it up. “You need to bring me to my father and then we stop Snoke. Also, I hid his data chip,” Mia nodded to Hux with a trembling lower lip, “and I will not tell you where it is if you don’t stop!” She stomped her foot, only slightly diminishing the power of her performance. “Right! Now!”

Hux huffed softly and dropped his head back on the pavement, blinking once, twice to clear the blood from his swimming eyes. That was Kylo Ren’s daughter, yes, dramatic as she could be, down to her last bone, but using the chip as blackmail? That was Hux levels of clever. She shouldn’t have seen him like this. She was supposed to trust these people, trust the Resistance, but as usual, Mia had had different plans. Stopping her was impossible in his state, the arm he didn’t lie on was broken at the shoulder joint and so was his left leg. His head… his head worked. As long as he lay still. That was easy. His torso hurt far too much. He tried anyways.

He got pushed back down by a small body that wriggled through the legs of the people around him and threw itself on top of him with a cry. Hux managed to wrap his good arm around her, managed to bury a smile in her hair before he fell unconscious.

  


“Da! Please! I’m sorry, just wake up! Da, please!”

Pain pulled him from the deep and forced him back into the harsh reality, the dirty light of a single half working fixture above, sobs and far too much pain to be dead.

What he saw was a ceiling of cheap plascrete, grimy and dirty from years of disuse. Moss grew in one corner, a fitting addition to the stale air that fed on moisture oozing from the stones. That moisture fed a feeling of cold, despite the unpleasantly warm temperatures. What little Hux could see of the rest of the cell, told him of an old water dispenser and a heavy blast door.

Under him, the cold synth leather of a bunk was slick with blood. What a peculiar detail to notice.

“Da, please wake up!” She sobbed and pressed her cold nose to his even colder hand, chasing away the prickling of sensation deprived skin for a second.

“Shhhh” He croaked on a slow exhale so much easier than forcing words past his throat.

Mia yelped at the sound, tore her face away from the scraped skin of his hand.

“Da!” Tears had dug trenches in the red dust caked on her face, but nothing could positively ever cover those bright eyes.

She should not be here. She should have been out there, safe. She should be trusting these people.

“They tried to take you away,” Mia whispered and dropped her head next to his on the bunk. Turning to face her was out of the question, his left arm lay listless at his side, a dull thrumming tattoo the only sign it was even still attached to his body. Same with his leg. His left side was positively on fire, drawing up from his lower back in a spasming dance of ‘breathe’ and ‘for Kriff’s sake, don’t’. All of that, he might have dealt with. They had been put through worse in their torture training, but if he moved a millimeter, even only his head, he’d throw up and that might prove fatal. With a heavy swallow, he dared a slow nod and the shadow of a smile.

“Are they…” Hux swallowed once more. “Alive?”

“Yeah,” Mia whispered. “I need them to call father.” She delivered the line matter of fact, despite her heavy sniffle and a swipe of her arm across her eyes.

“All of ‘em?” Hux strained his eyes as much as he could manage to catch a good glance of her and found tears still on her cheeks, undeterred by her exasperated eye roll.

“Yeeeeees. I burned one, but that was the generator that exploded. I apologized.”

She had apologized. Twisting his cold, tingling hand only to curl his tear-stained fingers into his daughter’s desperate grip used more strength than Hux had to spare.

Ren appeared at his side, a silent guardian, followed by Mia’s careful move up on the bunk. Hux prepared for pain that didn’t come, she only gripped his hand tighter and curled around it, very careful to not touch any other part of him.

She knew his pain, maybe not his nausea or the fever or the palpitations and nothing about the horrendous agony in his left lower back. She didn’t know how hard his head was swimming and how fast the minutes ticked by that he didn’t have to spare. But his pain, which was more than she needed to know, that she understood.

“Will he come?” Her question held a wealth of fears she’d never dare to voice.

Yes, Hux thought and smiled. Ren would come.

It was just a matter of staying alive for a little while longer. She needed him yet.

 

***

 

Time flowed like a syrupy river over an embankment made of sand. Heartbeats akin to sand grains, holding back, not pushing forward. Hux drifted on the melody of a child’s voice retelling her favorite story, recounting joyous times on a summer planet when unseen insects had sung in the grass around them in the garden behind the house.

Hux had never had a reason to be home. Home was a place, a foreign concept and not even Ren had been able to root on the Finalizer enough to anchor it in Hux’s heart. Mia had had no such qualms, to her Salk was the first safe place she had ever known and her youthful enthusiasm had embraced it, without doubt, pulling Hux along with her.

His boots would have hammered on the plastcrete floor of the warehouse in the mornings, thundering over the wood covered holes where giant rats had hollowed out the ground before Dolmen had gotten them poisoned. The man himself would sit in the overcrowded, underoxygened back office, laughing with Taz over a cup of caf before the pilot flew out. People would be laughing, too, when Hux accompanied Dolmen home to pick up his girl. Children screeching like metal tearing apart in the low set sun, playing war games with bullets made of water. Games that Mia always won whenever Hux was not there to warn her off it.

“...and Sol had a frog and it was blue... “

She conjured the picture into his mind as if he still needed convincing.

 

The sound of boots thundering over plastcrete intruded into his thoughts, safe darkness in his mind where it was only him and Mia and the stories she painted for him. His mind and the worry he felt too loud to even grant him this small reprieve.

Flesh scraped over metal, the rhythmic beat of a finger typing numbers.

Only when Mia fell silent, both inside his mind and to his ears, Hux registered that this was not part of a memory, not part of a pleasant past he longed to return to.

 

He didn’t have the strength to hold Mia back when the door clicked open and she slid out of bed. His mental order of ‘Get behind me!’ fell short of being an order or at being commanding in any form.

“No!” she responded and pushed her pet against his uninjured arm for safe keeping.

With a slow, arduous motion Hux opened his eyes to the painful light of that one, half broken lamp and forced his head around. Nausea swamped him at the motion. He swallowed hard, forced it down, only to be greeted by the room slowly rotating on an axis that in no way lay in the cubic middle if he assumed it to be a cuboid.

Hux jerked to force his sense of body to reset. His skin came away from the synth leather with a sickening slurp, long since stuck to it when the blood had dried. Hours had passed since they had dropped him on the bunk then. He had not once felt the need to see a bathroom. So, that explained it. Fever, disorientation, the pain. In the hypothetical event of his death, failing kidneys had never played a role. It had always been a blaster, an exploding Star Destroyer. Something heroic. Dutiful to the last. At least that he could still be.

 

‘Move, Mia,’ he commanded and was rewarded with a small wiggle of her feet, just enough that it allowed him to glance past her to see the Koorivar in the doorway and next to him….

Not Ren. The disappointment hurt. But of course, they wouldn’t send Ren, the chance that this was a trap far too high. And then there was also the real possibility that he had found someone else, better fitting. Someone who did not say goodbye and sent him away because of an obscure guilt instilled into him by a father he had always hated. Hux resented the tears that once more prickled in his eyes, a waste of liquid he could ill afford.

 

She was at once taller and smaller than he had thought. The way Ren had talked about her, she had always been his “little cousin” or “the girl”, but nothing in Rey Skywalker’s presence permitted the application of the adjective “small”, except for her stature. Standing next to the massive Koorivar, she was positively diminutive, barely reaching his chin, but it took only a moment to correct that statement when she whipped around to the male beside her.

 

“Why is she in here?” With appreciation, Hux noticed that her voice stayed level. She had no need to scream, she just increased the force behind it to a vicious snarl.

The Koorivar did the wise thing, raised his hands and backed against the wall.

“She injured S'lala. She blew up a generator! And she refused to leave him.” His eyes darted to Hux the same moment Mia reached behind her and curled her fingers around his hand.

“I won't let you,” was all she said.

The Koorivar was instantly forgotten when Rey crouched down just inside the door, leaving a few steps between her and the child as a demilitarized zone.

“I'm not here to hurt him. Your father sent me to bring you home.” She had not once so much as glanced in Hux's direction.

Not that it mattered. “Told you,” he croaked, allowing himself the small, through and through positive triumph. “Go home, Mia. He’s waiting.”

She turned to him and shook her head as if she suddenly understood that Rey had spoken ‘you’ in the singular.

“Da, no…” Her face fell apart with the tears from her eyes and Hux pushed her stuffed wolf into her hand “They’ll have to carry me out of here, Birdlet. I can’t walk.”

“But you’ll come?” She hoped still because somehow she would always be hoping.

“I’ll do my best, Mia. Now go.”

Rey’s hand - so small - curled around Mia’s shoulder. Gently, Hux noticed. She still didn’t look at him.

“Mia, yes? Do you wanna see my ship? It’s very famous.” Her lips pulled into a smile and dimples appeared on her cheeks. She seemed nice, friendly and honest in a way that always drew Mia in.

This time, too, she faltered a little, turned between Rey and Hux, her mind touching along his, along the parts he kept closed off, while her resolve reshaped itself.

“Alright….” she eyes narrowed in on Rey. “But only because my Da says so.”

Now Rey’s gaze shifted to Hux and he could only guess how he looked, feverish, bloody and beaten to a pulp, as far from General Hux as this young woman was from a Jakku Scavenger now. He thought he read something like respect in her eyes.

“And we’ll wait for him, yes?”

Rey looked away, too obvious, but then she forced a smile and nodded. “Yes.”

“Kiss,” Mia piped up, leaned in and brushed her lips over Hux’s forehead. “Be good,” he whispered before she took a step back.

Mia’s expectant gaze landed on Rey then, her arms clutching Ren tightly to her chest. If Hux were a man of humor, he’d comment on how, some way, all three Skywalker descendants had found their way into this dingy, mould ridden little cell. Instead, he noticed the absence of the data capsule around Mia’s wrist. He remembered with fading clarity her words on the landing strip, whispered reassurances between delirious dreams. But those thoughts too were chased away by the sudden realization that Mia would never be this complacent were she not shaken to the core.

She stared at him, tears only temporarily shored up, as Rey picked her up. Propped Mia onto her arms, as if she expected trouble.

Hux wanted to tell them to say hello to Ren, to tell him he missed him. To tell him …

 

The precarious state of peace lasted exactly until the door slammed shut and locked him in.

“NOOOOOOOOO!” She had to catch on at some point. “NOOOOOOOO! BRING ME BAAAAAAAAACK!” It echoed through the heavy cell door and in the desperate, quickly fading of a mind scrabbling against his.

That was not the last thing he wanted to hear in his life, it really wasn’t .

Hux didn’t care for the tears, it was over anyways. She would be fine. She would be alright. Her grandmother would be wiser now and Ren wouldn’t let anything happen to her. He had done it, he had saved her. When the tears came, he let them. He had reached the point where the pain ended.

 

The door opened once more. Not immediately, not before Hux gasped through the broken little sobs that never made it past his fractured ribs. He didn’t turn his head, he let it drop carelessly, to be caught by the natural boundaries put on his neck.

In the door stood a man that Hux had called one of his own at some point, but he was a different creature now, down to the light in his eyes. Hux’s eyes flicked downward. Still the same boots. Still the same posture,still a soldier. His shoulders squared, intelligent eyes scanned the room, taking in a myriad of details in two seconds before they landed on Hux.

FN-2187 carried no blaster. He carried an injector. The ultimate insult.

Hux forced the undamaged corner of his mouth into a rather crude approximation of a smile.

“So... we meet again.”

He had not hoped for a reaction, yet was disappointed when the former Stormtrooper only mapped his body with the cool, experienced glance of a medic. Hux scoffed.

“My kidneys are failing. A few fractures. Just wait. Or release me from my suffering.”

FN-2107 set the injector against his neck and pushed the button.

Hux smiled. He had won.  

 

***

 

“Psssst, not so loud. Let him sleep.” It was a deep voice that intruded into Hux's sweet, painless nothingness. “He just came out of the tank and he needs to rest.”

“Alright,” a much higher pitched voice answered in a bad stage whisper that Hux heard in strange duality vibrate against his chest and as actual sound. “They'll not hurt him more. I won't let them.”

Mia wriggled against him, because, hells, had that child never learned to lie still. She snuggled under his arm, her distressed little nose poking against his neck where he remembered a bruise, but no pain came.

“Neither will I, princess. I promise. But you’ve got to let him sleep, yes?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hux could perhaps open his eyes if he put his mind on it. He would have, months ago, before the little menace had stumbled into his life. Even before that, before the big menace stumbled out of it. Back when he had still been driven by duty above everything, and not by the approval of a little girl who thought warmth and contact were the ends all of galactic existence.

He turned his face into the large hand that ran through his hair with a smile, because why the hell not. He rarely dreamed so nicely and if this was death...

Hux's eyes flew open

“That wasn't me,” supplied the little voice and Ren's crooked grin drove the last misty clouds from Hux’s mind, like actual sunshine. Ren's hand turned into a tether that rooted Hux in reality as the fingers caught in the badly cuts strands of Hux's hair.

He didn't answer his daughter, only stared at Hux, his eyes revealing too much, as usual.

There was no reason to not wake, to not fight the drowning weight that kept Hux’s bones sunken into the clean linens of the bed. None.

“Shhhh,” Ren murmured. “just rest. You're safe.”

Hux snorted and burrowed his face in the baby fine hairs of his little girl, smiling despite himself.

“They won't dare touch you with two of us raising hell, if they disturb a hair on your head, Hux. Just sleep.” Ren's thumb rubbed slowly along the outer shell of Hux's ear. “Me and the princess are going to procure a certain data chip. Now that her conditions have been met.”

At this, Hux blinked, first at Ren, then at the little girl that had snuggled herself up against his body, squirmed under his arm, the way she liked to sleep.

“Conditions?” He wasn't sure if he had understood himself, he wasn't sure if he trusted his own brain yet to not have just conjured this as his ideal image of the afterlife.

“I exploded some electronics in their shuttle.” She smiled at him as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, “The bad men said they will ‘release you from your suffering’. I know what that means. Snoke said that too, and people died.”

She shivered under his hand, snuggled closer still. Ren watched them both, his brow drawn, aggravating the scar that bisected his face. He looked better, younger somehow, more balanced in himself as he patiently waited for his daughter to tell her tale. This Ren had no need for ‘now’ and ‘as I say’ anymore.

“I told Rey,” Mia murmured against Hux’s neck, “and she said, they wouldn't, and then I exploded their shuttle. I said ‘I will not tell you where the chip is until we take my Da.’ So.... and then I said, help him. And she did. Rey is good people. But she was annoyed at me. I didn't say anything.” She beamed. “Are you proud?”

“Yeah,” Hux croaked before he finished thinking about his words. “Interrogation 101 passed, birdlet. Flying colors.”

“Hux!” If Ren was trying to sound scandalized he maybe shouldn’t laugh. But Ren never gave a fuck about what he should have.

“Give them the chip, birdlet. They need the info. Your father needs the info to keep you safe.”

“You'll be here?” She piped and wriggled free of his arm.

“Yeah, I guess... I will be.” Looking up, Hux found Ren still smiling, unafraid, calm in the knowledge of this truth, even as he squatted down to let the girl climb into his arms and as he leaned in to breathe an almost chaste kiss against Hux’s lips. As if he expected to be denied.

As if.


End file.
